States have tried all sorts of things to prevent women from having abortions. They’ve enacted waiting periods, ultrasound laws and parental notifications. They’ve passed laws that force doctors to lie to women and force women to visit with ideological zealots. Some legislators have even attempted to make women get a man’s consent before obtaining the procedure – a paternalistic permission slip to access their legal rights.
Let's Stop Pretending Ivanka Trump Ever Gave a Damn About 'Women's Rights'
September 01, 2017
So much for Ivanka Trump as America’s moderate savior. The favored first daughter – who wants her name to be synonymous with women’s equality at work – has failed again and again to provide a measured influence on her father’s obsessive rollback of women’s rights. Her presence in the White House, a polished false promise, has done almost nothing to protect the most vulnerable victims of Trump’s policies.
This week, for example, the Trump administration decided to do away with a policy that would have mandated employers document their workers’ pay alongside gender and race information and provide it to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The idea is that requiring this kind of accountability from employers will help to narrow the wage gap. Tracy Sturdivant, executive director of Make It Work, called the administration’s decision “an unacceptable and deliberate attack on women in the workplace, especially black and Hispanic women”.
Given Ivanka’s “Women Who Work” campaign and her repeated claim that she wants to level the playing field for women’s wages, you would think the businesswoman would have rallied support to keep the policy in place – or at the very least disagreed with her father’s decision. (“Where I disagree with my father, he knows it and I express myself with total candor,” she once told Gayle King on CBS.)
Instead, Ivanka supported her father’s move, releasing a flat statement that claimed while “the intention was good ... the proposed policy would not yield the intended results”. Watch out, Gloria Steinem!
It’s become a pattern: Ivanka claims to care about an issue, her father does something horrible, Ivanka says and does nothing.
The first daughter has claimed to support the LGBT community, but where was her steady advice or independent spirit when her father hastily tweeted out that trans people would be banned from serving in any capacity in the military?
Outside of taking a few meetings the first months of Trump’s presidency, why has Ivanka said nothing of her father’s destructive stance on climate change – especially as Texas is underwater, battered by a hurricane?
Despite her supposed support for women’s rights, Ivanka’s sole suggestion to help save Planned Parenthood from the Republican effort to defund the organization was that they stop providing abortions.
When its president, Cecile Richards, of course refused this strange offer, Ivanka’s surrogates tried to reach out to board members behind Richards’ back. (They were given the same answer.) Richards later said: “Anyone who works in this White House is responsible for addressing why women are in the crosshairs of basically every single policy that we’ve seen out of this administration.”
And after Trump made a horrific statement in defense of white supremacists who terrorized Charlottesville, Virginia, and marched through the streets chanting “Jews will not replace us”, Ivanka’s best effort was to offer a tweet denouncing racism.
It’s not that I expected any better – I didn’t. Not on any of it. Despite all the conservative swooning over the telegenic businesswoman and the moderates who held out hope that she would steady Trump’s hand, it was always clear that Ivanka was nothing more than well-placed shield against accusations of bigotry against her father. Perhaps he listens to her counsel, and perhaps these issues matter to her to some extent. But clearly not enough.
It’s time to stop hoping that anyone in the White House or the Trump family will be able to stop the president from destroying progress made or hurting the American people. It’s up to us. And I have more faith in the American people than I do a woman who can’t say no to her dad.
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Not All Comments Are Created Equal: The Case for Ending Online Comments
It shouldn’t be a surprise that I’m not fond of comments sections. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find many female writers who are. On most sites – from YouTube to local newspapers – comments are a place where the most noxious thoughts rise to the top and smart conversations are lost in a sea of garbage.
There’s a reason, after all, that the refrain “don’t read the comments” has become ubiquitous among journalists. But if we’re not to read them, why have them at all?
I wasn’t always a comments-hater. When I started a feminist blog in 2004, I was thrilled to finally be able to talk with other young feminists online and was open to chatting with detractors. I saw the comments section as a way to destabilize the traditional writer/reader relationship – no longer did audiences need to consume an article without a true opportunity to respond. Comments even made my writing better those days; feedback from readers broadened the way I thought and sometimes changed my mind.
But as the internet and audiences grew, so did the bile. Now it feels as if comments uphold power structures instead of subverting them: sexism, racism and homophobia are the norm; threats and harassment are common. (That’s not even counting social media.)
For writers, wading into comments doesn’t make a lot of sense – it’s like working a second shift where you willingly subject yourself to attacks from people you have never met and hopefully never will. Especially if you are a woman. As Laurie Penny has written, “An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the internet. Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill and urinate on you.” The problem is so bad that online harassment is a keynote subject this year at the Online News Association conference.
My own exhaustion with comments these days has less to do with explicit harassment – which, at places like the Guardian, is swiftly taken care of. (Thank you, moderators!) Rather, it’s the never-ending stream of derision that women, people of color and other marginalized communities endure; the constant insistence that you or what you write is stupid or that your platform is undeserved. Yes, I’m sure straight, white, male writers get this kind of response too – but it’s not nearly as often and not nearly as nasty.
I don’t much understand the appeal of comments for readers either. Outside of the few places that have rich and intelligent conversation in comments, what is the point of engaging in debate where the best you can hope for are a few pats on the back from strangers for that pithy one-liner? Isn’t that what Facebook or Twitter is for?
Seriously: when tech news website Re/code shut down its comments section last year, editors cited the growth of social media as one reason for the decision: “The bulk of discussion of our stories is increasingly taking place there, making onsite comments less and less used and less and less useful.”
Comments sections also give the impression that all thoughts are created equal when, well, they’re not. When Popular Science stopped publishing comments, for example, it was because “everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again...scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to ‘debate’”. When will we see the humanity and dignity of women as a fact, rather than an opinion?
It’s true, I could just stop reading comments. But I shouldn’t have to. Ignoring hateful things doesn’t make them go away, and telling women to simply avoid comments is just another way of saying we’re too lazy or overwhelmed to fix the real problem.
Websites and news sources are increasingly moving forward without comments because they find them unnecessary and counterproductive. In my perfect world, more places would follow their lead – at least until publishers find lasting solutions to making comments worth it. Worth it for readers and for writers. Because the nastiness on our doorstep has piled too high for too long, and I just want to get out of the house.