It didn’t bother me that most of the points made in these two pieces were just scratching the surface–I am thoroughly ensconced in feminist culture but understand that most Newsweek readers aren’t. And you gotta start somewhere! I get this.

It also didn’t bother me (well, maybe a little) that the three journalists who wrote this story were white. After all, I know many white feminist writers who understand that race and gender and class and geography intersect, and they show that in their writing. If I thought white people could only write about the views of white people, I wouldn’t have written an entire book with another white person displaying just how multilayered young feminism really is. There is certainly a diversity problem in mainstream media–92 percent of television news directors are white, most major newspapers’ staffs are 80 percent white–but white people can be accurate and informed reporters as long as they seek out a range of voices.

Which leads to what did bother me–a lot: In the 3500 words total that Newsweek devoted to the future of feminism this week, amid the 10 people who are quoted in these pieces, not one woman of color shows up. Seriously.

This happens constantly when the mainstream pubs try to cover feminism. It happened in a CNN news segment last June, where the network’s definition of feminism was Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton, and Gloria Steinem. It happened at a highly publicized Planned Parenthood event a few months ago called “Voices on Feminism,” which consisted of, yep, three white women.

Some might argue that this is more a reflection of the kinds of women calling themselves feminists rather than the fault of the mainstream media. And it’s true, to a point–although there are millions of bad-ass feminists of color, many women of color do feel marginalized by feminism–these women in Girldrive, for a start. But guess why? Because articles, TV clips, and events like these continue to marginalize them even as they attempt to widen the conversation about feminism. They ignore the young women of color doing feminist work nowadays like Stacyann Chin, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Rinku Sen, to name a few. Not to mention the ones who paved the way for women writers and journalists (Ethel Payne? Alice Walker? Marcia Gillespie? HEL-lo.) These three women at Newsweek didn’t even bring up the issue of race, much less seek out the voices of non-white feminists. This is a huge. Fucking. Problem.

What really gets me is that the majority of young feminist activists do think of feminism in an intersectional way. Just look at the blogger rosters at blogs like Feministing, Feministe, or Racialicious. Just look at the staff at organizations like WIMN or INCITE! or the ladies in Girldrive. Young feminists are trying not to make the same mistake that some Second Wave white feminists made of being blind to race issues. But places like Newsweek, CNN and other mainstream outlets make that a frustrating uphill struggle by painting a whitewashed, monolithic picture of feminism.

–Nona

UPDATE: Jezebel’s Irin wrote a post riffing off Anna’s post on how the picture is all white women (which, in my opinion, isn’t as important as getting the words and names of feminists of color into the piece, since the photo is of the writers and the women who filed the original Newsweek suit.). But yes, regardless of “how much sense” the photo makes, perhaps the editors should have thought twice about visually representing feminism with these women rather than a cross-section.

UPDATE #2: The authors’ blog, Equality Myth, wrote this in response. I wish I could just call them up and talk to them on the phone. It’s not racism–it’s colorblindness. It’s failing to realize the bigger picture of what feminism means today. It’s choosing to interview Ariel Levy, Rachel Simmons, and Gail Collins–who are all amazing but not representative by any means. There’s also such a thing as constructive criticism, which I think Irin gives.

Ms. Sorrentino,

Your article criticizing Angie Jackson’s choice to speak publicly about having an abortion on Twitter, YouTube, and her blog was one of the more infuriating things I’ve read all week. And that’s saying something. You conclude your piece by saying that Jackson’s decision is “at its worst…self-serving, exhibitionist and selfish. At best, it has ‘bad judgment’ written all over it.” But after re-reading your argument many times, I’m with Amanda and Jos: I can’t for the life of me figure out how you got there without some seriously anti-choice, anti-feminist thinking.

The first strike against Jackson in your book seems to be that she was irresponsible for getting pregnant…because she didn’t get sterilized. “If her decision about ending her child-bearing is solid and responsible, one has to wonder why she didn’t just have a tubal ligation.” Really? One does? I don’t. I don’t think it’s any of my business what type of birth control method Jackson uses and why she chose it. But as long as we’re on the subject, she says she was using an IUD when she unexpectedly got pregnant. Coincidentally, I also use an IUD! And while I have no idea why Jackson chose hers, I know one of the things I was attracted to was the 99.9% effectiveness rate. The idea that you would question a woman’s “commitment” to preventing pregnancies because she opted for a long-term 99.9% effective method that, let me tell you, can be extremely painful to have inserted over a permanent 99.9% effective method that requires invasive surgery is just ridiculous.

But, more importantly, since when is the pro-choice movement in the business of prescribing contraceptive methods and deciding which women’s abortions are acceptable and which ones aren’t? She was using a goddamn IUD. But even if she was using a hope and a prayer, she gets to be supported in her decision to have an abortion by us. That’s the deal. Because all contraceptive methods can—and do—fail, and because it’s patronizing to assume you know more about a woman’s life and reproductive system than she does. Sure, we’d like all women to use the most effective form of birth control that works for them, but let’s leave paternalistic judgments and public shaming to the other side—they’ve really got it down at this point. The second strike against Jackson simply seems to be that she is a blogger and is writing a book; she must be tweeting her abortion to “boost future book sales.” But you provide not one shred of evidence—and there seems to be no reason to believe—that’s the case. From the beginning, Jackson has consistently and clearly stated her motivation for speaking out: “I’m doing this to demystify abortion. I’m doing this so that other women know, ‘Hey, it’s not nearly as terrifying as I had myself worked up thinking it was.’ It’s just not that bad.” She mentioned her book in an interview to explain that talking publicly about her abortion seemed natural to her since she’s been writing about her experiences and tackling controversial subjects online for years.

Next, you present this as a generational problem; Jackson, being 27, takes her right to abortion for granted and therefore must treat it lightly. Women of your generation, who had no legal reproductive rights and saw first-hand the horrors of illegal abortions, “understand how precious the right to choose is” and “know things that Ms. Jackson clearly cannot fathom.” Sure, Jackson wasn’t forced to have a back-alley abortion and yes, that’s thanks to the hard-won victories of reproductive rights pioneers such as yourself. But, in fact, Ms. Jackson clearly does appreciate this legal right, or she wouldn’t have felt it was so important to speak publicly about it in the hopes of demystifying the experience for other women. She also seems well-versed in the history of the reproductive rights movement. In fact, by speaking out she’s simply continuing a long tradition of women telling their abortion stories in order to destigmatize and humanize the choice–from the 1969 Redstocking Abortion Speakout to consciousness-raising meetings to Ms. magazine’s “We Had Abortions” feature to documentaries like I Had An Abortion and websites like I’m Not Sorry. You seem to assume that because Jackson’s channels of communication are Twitter, YouTube, and Blogspot, she must be flippant about her right to abortion. It doesn’t and she isn’t; it just means it’s 2010.

And it appears Jackson might have a better grasp on the threats to abortion rights in 2010 than you do. You say that the right you and your peers were fighting so hard for was based on the right to “privacy” and imply that by sharing her decision with her 800 Twitter followers Jackson is somehow abusing that right. But since when has the right to privacy incurred an obligation to keep it secret? Nobody, least of all Jackson, is questioning the fact that her decision to get an abortion was and should be made privately–by her alone, in consultation with her family and doctor. (It’s not like she did an online poll of her Twitter followers to decide whether to continue the pregnancy for heaven’s sake.)

But it’s that second decision–the decision to speak publicly about her choice–that is at issue here and that is steeped in cultural forces that take it well beyond the right to privacy. The fact that most women who have abortions don’t talk about them–even with friends and family–is not just because it’s a private decision but also because abortion is still shrouded in stigma and shame. Obviously, not all women would want to tell the world about their abortion–just like not all women would want to tell the world about their pregnancy cravings, or their root canal surgery, or their mother’s death. And those women have the right to keep their abortion entirely to themselves because, of course, it’s nobody’s goddamn business. But when one-third of American women have an abortion in their lifetimes and yet just one of them tweeting about it provokes CNN appearances, death threats, and denouncements even from pro-choicers, that’s a pretty good clue something is up. Something like–oh, I don’t know–pervasive cultural messages that tell women abortion is something to be ashamed of and not something to be talked about. And in that context, the decision to speak publicly about it is not just within Jackon’s rights (as you begrudgingly admit)–it becomes a political act.

It’s frankly astounding to me that someone who has spent their life “on the front lines of the abortion debate” could write about Jackson’s choice without even once acknowledging this broader social context. Because that context matters. The fact that abortion is so stigmatized has real effects on the debate over reproductive rights today. It means that the anti-choice movement is able to step into the deafening silence and paint women who have abortions as irresponsible or confused or monstrous. It means that fewer and fewer young doctors are willing to provide abortions in their practices. It means that people my age are less pro-choice than previous generations because it’s easier to believe that women who get abortions aren’t the women they know and love.

Reasonable pro-choice people can disagree about the extent to which one public abortion story like Jackson’s will change this powerful stigma, but to not even acknowledge its existence and its damaging influence is more than “bad judgment” in my opinion. At best, your article demonstrates a lack of understanding about the state of abortion politics today. At worst, it reinforces the stigma around abortion by echoing anti-choice ideas about what kinds of women get abortions, who should be allowed to, and how they should feel about it.

Sincerely,

Maya Dusenbery

“Very Young Girls” is an expose of human trafficking that follows thirteen and fourteen year old American girls as they are seduced, abused, and sold on New York’s streets by pimps, and treated as adult criminals by police. The film follows the barely-adolescent girls in real time, using vérité and intimate interviews with them as they are first lured on to the streets and the dire events which follow. The film also uses startling footage shot by the brazen pimps themselves giving a rare glimpse into how the cycle of street life begins for many women.

Check out the trailer below. Thanks to Sadye’s Twitter feed for the tip.

In my daily existence, I deal on a strictly local basis. My job as a reporter confines me to five towns in the Chicago suburbs. Even most of my freelance work and blogging intensely focuses on the uniquely American experience.

So I’m thankful for this day to jolt me out of my tunnel vision, especially since it’s easy to miss the dwindling amount of international coverage the media provides nowadays. And even though Girldrive is a truly American story, some women we talked to explicitly told me and Emma that feminism needs to get out of its Western bubble.

Here are some IWD events going on across the country. Also see Gender Across Borders’ International Women’s Day blog directory–many many feminist blogs are jumping on the bandwagon today and blogging about global issues.

This rips open a wound for me–I spent most of 2007 contemplating this issue. But I’m gonna weigh in afresh now that I’ve just celebrated 2 years in my healthiest, post-high-school, Completely Committed Relationship (technically marriage, but that’s another story)–the sex-and-love “holy grail,” according to the many women’s and teen magazines Kate lists in her Salon piece. Before, it was my “sorta” this or my “fuck buddy” that or my “I wish I knew what he was thinking” friend-with-benefits. And I gotta say, no matter how much I railed against Laura Sessions Stepp and Dawn Eden and Miriam Grossman and all the other rightwing, anti-feminist cautionary matrons, the facts remained: I knew how it felt to agonize over a text message. I knew how much it hurt to hear that the guy I’d been hooking up with “didn’t do relationships.” And I knew what it was like to use sexuality to coax a guy into being with me, only to have it fail miserably.

Feminist or not, that shit sucks. And it happens a lot, to women and girls everywhere. And yet, if you consider me and the vast majority of America who eventually couple up, it seems to end up okay. What to make of all this?

Rachel asks in the aforelinked post:

Now, just to be clear, I’m all for the freedom to hook up. But let’s face it: despite our desire to give women the freedom to plunder the bar scene and flex their sexual appetites, it would appear a whole lot of them are pretty happy playing by old school rules, thank you very much. Incidentally, one of the women smart enough to figure this out just sold her 5 billionth book, or something like that.

Does that make me a right-winger? Can I still be a feminist and say that I’m against this brand of sexual freedom? I fear feminism has been backed into a corner here. It’s become antifeminist to want a guy to buy you dinner and hold the door for you. Yet – picture me ducking behind bullet proof glass as I type this — wasn’t there something about that framework that made more space for a young woman’s feelings and needs?

I do feel where Rachel is coming from. But those old models are based on the idea that girls are fragile, that they need to be sheltered from the ills of the world. They’re based on, as Kate says, being the girl that guys want. They’re based on, as Amanda outlines, sexism plain and simple. So if we don’t want to go the “Girls Gone Mild” route and start waiting for dudes to ask us on candlelit dates, does that mean it’s hopeless to find a happy sexual medium as teens and young, single women?

Kate says no. “[I]f we teach all kids that there’s a wide range of potentially healthy sexual and emotional relationships,” she says, “and the only real trick (granted, it’s a doozy) is finding partners who are enthusiastic about the same things you want, then there’s room for a lot more people to pursue something personally satisfying at no one else’s expense.” That’s one of the smartest statements I’ve ever read on this topic. Amanda, meanwhile, says we need to stop making women shoulder the burden of keeping men in check, and concentration on getting “boys to appreciate girls more as human beings.” A-fucking-men. (No pun intended.)

But there’s also this: We need to admit as a culture that teens are sexual beings, and that more often than not, sexual maturity has a completely different timeline than emotional maturity. This is, to be sure, skewed by sexism and restrictive gender roles to make sexual coming-of-age worse for girls. But beyond that, maybe discovering what you want sexually and emotionally is just part of growing up–and that’s okay.

And for that matter, what’s with this still-dominant narrative that all teen girls should want a monogamous, snuggly, worshipping boyfriend? I wanted relationships from fantastic fucks all through high school and college, but something tells me that I repeatedly confused lust for love and convinced myself that I wanted a boyfriend, when really I just wanted a screwfest (although I can’t be sure). For the record, I am not–I repeat, am not–saying that when girls write Rachel about the pain they’re going through, they’re not being honest with themselves. I know better than anyone how that pain feels. It’s just that we never consider the power of cultural messages amid the mysterious phenomenon of girls wanting relationships more often than boys. I agree with Amanda that I don’t think it’s biological–there are societal patterns at work here. If we’re told that casual sex is unfulfilling and that we’re going to want relationships, chances are we’ll end up wanting them. And why not? That’s what Seventeen, Glamour, and all my friends always told me.

The interesting thing about my particular sexual history–the kind of narrative that I have yet to read about in all these books and articles about hooking up–is that I had great, pleasurable, safe sex in high school and college with guys who were nevertheless emotionally immature and noncommital and who hurt my feelings all the time. Does that mean I shouldn’t have had sex with them at all–or does it mean I should have been honest with myself (and them, too) about what our relationship was really about? I do remember obsessing, crying, wishing he’d want a “real” relationship with me, as many girls who write to Rachel express. But do I regret the sex, do I feel like I “gave myself away” too early at 15? Hell No. It was one of the most exciting, fascinating, and interesting things about high school. Girls deserve to discover themselves sexually at their own pace, to be neither rushed into having sex nor shamed into not having it. They deserve to have their very own “This is bullshit” moments without wearing a chastity belt.

So, as Rachel worries: Was I permanently affected by this nebulous, masochistic phase, from accepting less than what I wanted emotionally? Yes, but not in a bad way. In fact, I’d venture to claim that without all those past experiences, I wouldn’t have been equipped to be in the honest, nuanced, decidedly modern relaish I am in now.

The “hookup culture” must not be that new of a phenomenon if I was experiencing this stuff in the late nineties–and now at 25, I can employ my 10-year-old hindsight. Today, I found a fascinating piece of writing in my diary about “E,” my first “boyfriend” and first lay in high school who made it perfectly clear he was not into a relationship. In a rare moment of clarity, my 15-year-old self wrote this:

“I think people are wrong when they say that sex and love HAVE to be together. I figured out why me and E have good sex. Physically, we’re in love. Our bodies are perfect for eachother, we satisfy eachother’s sexual urges like we were born for one another. And we’re not really like that personality-wise. But that’s okay! I don’t know why that’s a bad thing, and why everyone looks down upon it. Just because mentally we’re not in love doesn’t mean it’s emotionless sex. It’s not. It’s kinda like our bodies have emotions. Like our minds don’t particularly click, but our kisses and heartbeats and waves of sex drive do. What’s wrong with that???? We’re not USING eachother; we just have a connection that is very hard for people to understand. If they saw us together, they would know what I mean. I’m fine with it, and I think it will go on as long as it takes for me to find someone I have mental AND physical perfectness with, because that’s what I need to be in a relationship…And as long as I got one half, why give it up because OTHER people think its morally wrong? I mean, I wish me and E had both, but it’s been clearly established that we don’t, so fine. It doesn’t automatically turn into a bad thing.”

There you have it. Love and sex don’t always go together, especially for horny 15-year-olds. I could be totally off-base, but I don’t think I was a freak for thinking this. If you’re comfortable with accepting that teens are sexual people with their own desires, there’s no getting around that boys and girls sometimes feel this way. I said this in 2007 and I still believe it now: Sex is the ultimate risk, a risk that makes human relationships complicated, intoxicating and wonderful. It’s an emotional risk when you’re 18 the same way it’s a risk when you’re 40. Each time, as long as you’re safe and armed with the right info, it’s amazing to feel alive and take that risk.

Granted, I was armed with the right info. I had good sex education and candid parents. But many girls are getting scolded by their elders and pressured by their peers. Some are in abstinence-only education classes and told they’ll be too “used” or “dirty” for their future husbands if they have sex. The vast majority are not given the space they need to figure out what they truly want from their sexual relationships.

I agree with Rachel that it feels awful to have to compromise yourself, but testing out your sexual and romantic bottom lines may just be a rite of passage for teenagers experimenting with their sexuality–which is what the sexual revolution should have been about, rather than expecting women to simply indulge men’s fantasies. I doubt things will ever be perfect the first time a girl tries to define a sexual reality that works for her–especially if she’s told to follow age-old dating rules that clearly didn’t work the first time around. What I do hope for the future is that young women be allowed to take moments of sexual confusion in stride without conservatives breathing down their necks, without being called sluts by their peers, without feeling like they’ve ruined their chances at marriage forever, without being made to think that boys are emotionless sexbots, without letting an unsatisfying relationship cross over into the abusive zone–all while getting factual information about sex and STIs from their schools and families. Don’t girls deserve that much?

*Most of the freakouts over the “hookup scene” happens in the context of heterosexual relationships, since according to the majority of sexual conservatives, queer teen girls don’t have peen-in-vadge sex and therefore, as Kate puts it, “don’t exist.”

UPDATE: More C & G being awesome on the Today Show.

The Great Recession has impacted every family and Latino families are no different. Or has it been different? Join in the conversation as four Latinas from policy, punditry and community organizing discuss the impact of the recession on Latino families. What does a Latino worker look like? What are the contributions of Latino workers to the economy? Can the government do more to encourage job creation? As more Latinas take on more jobs, who is caring for their children? How are Latino families changing to make room for Latinas who brings home the bacon?

h/t Viva La Feminista

Ferraro was livid, and distraught. What more did Hillary Clinton have to do to prove herself? How could anyone — least of all Ferraro’s own daughter — fail to grasp the historic significance of electing a woman president, in probably the only chance the country would have to do so for years to come?

…Mothers and grandmothers who saw themselves in Clinton and formed the core of her support faced a confounding phenomenon: Their daughters did not much care whether a woman won or lost. There was nothing, in their view, all that special about electing a woman — particularly this woman — president. Not when the milestone of electing an African American president was at hand.

Didn’t it ever occur to Ferraro that young women can think for themselves? Ferraro’s daughter undoubtedly did grasp the significance of a woman president. It’s just that Clinton wasn’t the woman for her. Not because, as the article hypothesizes, “[s]he was the wrong woman at the wrong time; she was a Clinton; she hadn’t gotten there on her own; a woman could be elected another year.” Most likely because she pondered the candidates’ policies and campaign promises like any other normal person. Ferraro’s comments eerily echo the opportunistic language of the GOP and other off-the-mark journalists, who criticized feminists for not supporting Sarah Palin just because she was a woman. It doesn’t quite take that plunge, but it’s dangerously teetering.

Personally, I didn’t vote for Hillary because she endorsed the Iraq War–an inexcusable move that went against my core value system (of course, I didn’t know at the time the extent Obama was going to escalate action in Afghanistan, but anyway…). And that’s only one of the many factors I weighed when I voted in the primary. I did believe that Hillary would be an advocate for women’s rights, but, based on his campaign, I felt the same way about Barack. And so far, he’s been pretty good–by overturning the Global Gag Rule and signing the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay act–and although I’m disturbed by the increasingly anti-choice language in the health care debate, I’m not convinced that Clinton would have any more power in this case.

It’s also disturbing that the author of the piece assumes young women privilege race issues over that of gender. And yeah, some people feel that way, including some of our Girldrive interviewees. Still, I know I’m not alone when I say that I don’t think of them as competing issues. I think of race as intertwined with gender, that sexism worsens racism and the other way around. That’s the thing about our generation–we’re holistic, intersectional, and adverse to boxes. We’re the generation trying to break down the unproductive cycle of the oppression Olympics. And yes, more than a few of us are feminists. It’s just that the mainstream press seldom pays attention to us.

This isn’t the first time the Washington Post has made me livid with a piece chastising young people, with an extra-special focus on females. These kinds of articles insult the intelligence of young women everywhere, and I’m starting to get really damn sick of them.

UPDATE: Katy and Jessica are equally pissed.

I read this news a couple months ago at Feminist Mormon Housewives. I was running around having Girldrive readings and such, and therefore forgot to post on it. But I was reminded about it again when someone showed me this Facebook group protesting the decision–which has almost 2,000 members! One of the women involved, Sara, recently posted that the university has started “negotiations” on the issue after thousands of students signed a petition. Beyond that, the incident has seemed to have spurred a tight-knit community of young Mormon feminists sharing information with each other. Like this Facebook post:

Valerie Hudson (of the BYU WomanStats project) was recognized as one of the 100 most influential global thinkers of the year by Foreign Policy. One more piece of evidence that the gender-related research coming out of BYU is important, relevant, and getting positive press for the university.

There are a few good posts on this issue like this one and this one. Below is an excerpt from Elisa’s passionate letter on FMH:

This is what I am telling those I write to who are not of our faith: Just because the choices LDS women make based on our faith are considered old-fashioned, doesn’t mean that we aren’t strong, intelligent women who believe in gender equality and everything else feminism stands for. I am proud to consider myself a feminist, and so do many other men and women at this university. We desperately want for this program to not go the way of several other important programs at this university (such as our International Development minor, another magnet for more liberal and therefore supposedly more dangerous students, which was eliminated recently), and it’s possible that if enough people outside of our community stand up for the WRI, maybe the higher-ups will change their minds.

One more thing: I may be a convert, a democrat, a feminist, and I may have a swearing problem that I still haven’t licked, but this is my church too.  I’m not going anywhere, but it’s things like this that make it so hard to be a BYU student.  This is not an issue of faith. Most of the students at BYU are faithful adherents to the LDS faith and are not being oppressed or silenced by the Church itself. Rather, it is the bureaucracy at the university level that is the source of the problem for myself and all other like-minded students here. I have found that my faith is one of the greatest sources of my personal empowerment as a women, and that my religious beliefs and my social beliefs complement rather than contradict each other. For BYU students, the solution is not to abandon our faith, rather to find ways to reconcile the beliefs of another generation to the ideals we uphold with as much fervor as we do our religion. Shutting down our Women’s Research Institute would be a step in the entirely wrong direction.

BYU students are working hard to restore the institute. If you’re in Utah, ask Sara how you can help. Email her here.

This incident not only sheds light on the way young people are galvanized to protect feminism when it starts slipping away from them, but also raises interesting questions about the relationship between feminism and faith, and the effects of the recession on women’s studies programs and research institutes across the country.