International Women's Day 2017

                                   "In my city, women and children are not dogs and slaves."
                                                                              -main character, Voices, by Ursula K. LeGuin

I want this to be true in my city and my world. 

I want women to be fully equal human beings with equal access to education and healthcare and childcare.

I want women to be able to fully own their own bodies, including being able to divorce, marry, and not marry at will.  How much do we hear about men being denied viagra?  How much do we hear about women being denied birth control?

I want sex education for women to be free and inclusive and comprehensive (I trumpet Scarleteen as an excellent place to start, but it requires an internet connection and the knowledge that it's there), including a thorough overview of the risks of permanent damage (in many weird ways) and death associated with pregnancy and childbirth.  I want deaths like Savita Halappanavar's never to happen again. 

I want women to earn the same amount of money as male counterparts.  I want women to be able to drive cars, walk down the street and take the bus without being harassed or attacked, take out loans, and have their own bank accounts and property without any oversight.

I want women to be able to vote and be able to hold every public office that their male counterparts can and to otherwise participate fully in public civic life.

I want the cultural narratives that say that women are nice and submissive and gentle and good with children and not good with computers or math or science to die the death.

I want the sale of women under the guise of marriage to stop.  Yes, in America too.

I want individual bodily consent to be inviolable and individual life choices to be as free as possible.  For everyone.

No, it probably won't happen today.  Or even tomorrow.  Or maybe for a hundred years.  But we deserve this.  Everyone deserves this.  And I think that if we can imagine kinder, more respectful of our common humanity ways to live together as human beings, we can make it happen.  Here's one step forward: coming of age without female genital mutilation

Free Trials on Kiva for International Women's Day

As part of International Women's Day, Kiva microfinance organization is sponsoring $3 million (!!!) in free loans to women as a way to empower women, and, by making their lives better, make everyone's lives better.

Go here to make a free loan through March 8, 2017: kiva.org/investinher
 
We have the data (links below), and treating women as full human beings with equal access to education, healthcare, jobs, and every aspect of full participation in public life, means better outcomes not only for the women, but for their children and families. 

Not everyone chooses to have children, but everyone existing was born.  Making women's lives better will make everyone's lives better.

Relevant readings on this from the United Nations:

http://en.unesco.org/gem-report/sites/gem-report/files/girls-factsheet-en.pdf

http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/economic-empowerment/facts-and-figures

http://blogs.worldbank.org/health/female-education-and-childbearing-closer-look-data

Abstinence Only Drowning Prevention

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: A Few Annotated Thoughts

It's not fun to talk about the horrible, shameful things in our past and present.  But if we don't talk about them, we "forget," or maybe we never know.  And we need to talk about them.  Because we as human beings have tremendous power to hurt each other, both individually and in the aggregate of the many tiny injustices that we may not notice, or recognize as hurtful, if we're not the ones being hurt.  We need to know the horrible things in the past and the present to guard against them.  We need to hear from those we've hurt, so that we can STOP doing those things.

If you know and live the culture of the southern U.S.:

• do older African Americans call you Sir/Ma'am regardless of whether they're older than you?
• do you call older African Americans Sir/Ma'am the way you would older white women and men?

Think about it.


Here's some reading.  I've tried to bring in mostly sources written by African Americans. 

What Ruby Bridges Can Teach Us About Desegregation, from The Graffiti Wall.  Do you know who Ruby Bridges is?  I didn't.  My elementary school had ~1 African American child per class of 25 children when I was there.

Black Lives Matter.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  (P.S., y'all: white police officer is NOT the most dangerous job:  https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf)

Black Skeptics website.  I like to check in here occasionally.

Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglas.  Still relevant, still powerful.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: a few classes in my elementary school read this.  Never my class.  (We read about a thoughtless white boy who deliberately stirred up a bees' nest and then died from an allergic reaction to the stings.   Aesop's Fables are still better.)

The Enduring Solidarity of White Racism.

White police and doctors unlawfully arrest and detain an African American woman for...not being properly cowed and submissive and driving a nice car?

Trigger warning for violent images: The lynching of Jesse Washington.  Not the only lynching.  Not the only state and town in the U.S.A. that participated in lynching.  And we white people by and large TURN AWAY AND PRETEND THIS DIDN'T HAPPEN.  WE PRETEND WE DON'T SEE THIS SUFFERING.  WE PRETEND WE'RE NOT GUILTY.

And at this point I start crying so I'm going to stop here for today.      

Requiescat in Pace: Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher has died.

This is my tribute, not quite to Carrie Fisher, but to Princess Leia.  They are not the same, but they are inseparable, and it was as Princess Leia that I knew her.

It was Princess Leia who helped me find my freedom as a woman.  

There are still a lot of social justice problems with the Star Wars universe, and I don't want to ignore them, but I choose to talk about them another time.

When I found Star Wars I was in second grade, lonely and bored nearly out of my skull with second grade and with most of the books in the classroom and desperately short of female heroes I could admire.  (Western fairy tale and myth collections, J.R.R. Tolkien, Rudyard Kipling, Laura Ingalls Wilder, C.S. Lewis, Robert Lewis Stevenson, etc.: my childhood reading was canonically European but conspicuously lacking in women who fight, lead, and make their own decisions about what to do with their bodies and lives.  Our school library did have a copy of The Hero and the Crown, but I was too intimidated by the thick, blank cover and the glares of the librarians to check it out until years later.)  

I wasn't allowed to watch movies except when I was so sick I couldn't enjoy them, but I was allowed to buy novelizations of the original Star Wars trilogy:

I read these until I know them nearly word for word even now.  It was my first taste of high drama with characters I could identify with.  I loved Princess Leia.  I admired the heck out of her.  I wanted to be like her.  I spent so many interminable mind-killing church services desperately wishing and wishing I'd been born into the Star Wars universe.  The Force didn't tell women to shut up and submit and go to heaven by having babies.  Anyone with an affinity for the Force could become a Jedi knight, not just people with penises.  (And I, obviously, would be a Jedi, because we are all the heroes of our own stories.)

Princess Leia was a leader in the Rebellion, under Mon Mothma (another woman!).  And she didn't just sit around and be the love interest.  She ran blockades, endured torture without breaking, came up with solutions while under blaster fire, stood with the other generals at the battle of Yavin, got bullied by Han Solo but talked back to him, disguised herself and walked into Jabba's palace to rescue Han, went with the ground commandos on Endor, and eventually became President of the New Republic.   

Princess Leia was a warrior and a leader and a woman. 

Princess Leia is still my hero.

Requiescat in pace, Carrie Fisher.  

The Hopeful News News Channel: This is What a Feminist Looks Like

President Obama talks about how far we've come, and how we still need to change ourselves to achieve an America in which "every single child can make of her life what she will."  Because "That’s what twenty-first-century feminism is about: the idea that when everybody is equal, we are all more free."

I'm much more pessimistic about the status of everyone not white cisgender heterosexual suitably machismo male in America, but it doesn't hurt to take five minutes for a hopeful break, right? 

Enthusiastic Consent for Everyone, Real Life Edition

Recently someone asked me if they could give me a hug.  They ASKED me.  They asked ME.  And they waited to hear my answer before making a single move towards me.  It was amazing and wonderful.

More of that for everyone, please. 

What Good Is Math?

From Kiery King, who was deprived of a basic education, the reason why they need math:

http://www.kieryking.com/2016/01/on-math-programming/

and how being denied an education based on sex is still very much alive and well in the United States of America:

http://www.kieryking.com/2014/02/in-which-my-genitals-mean-i-dont-learn-math-or-science/

If you know someone who wants to do (math, science, sewing, whatever) don't tell them they can't because they are (female, black, male, whatever).  Don't stand there and let that person's parents tell them they don't need to/are not allowed to learn.  Deliberately sabotaging someone else's choices because of arbitrary and nonsensical gender restrictions is a vile thing to do.

Thank You For Treating Me as a Capable, Rational Adult, Even Though I Present as a Short Cis-Female Who Does Not Drive a Big Truck

I shouldn't have to thank people for treating me like an autonomous, rational human being.  This should be the baseline, not the apex.

But I did it anyway.  Specifically, I thanked two of my (male) colleagues for taking me seriously during my time at the job I just left.  Because one of the diverse ways this town frustrates me to screaming tears is the way people just. won't. believe. me when I say something.  (Most recently, on Wednesday, the lady that I had to tell several times that yes, I really can fit the large boxes I was trying to buy into my small car, I've done it before, yes, really, so please, just sell me the boxes already!)

Ozymandias has some good points on this: On Praiseworthiness.  I think I did the right thing to thank them.  But I'm also angry that I felt it was needed.

Votes for Certain Women

It came to my disgusted attention recently that there is a person on a news show who is willing to say almost in so many words that young women are too vapid to vote, and should really be dismissed to go get back to their online dating sites.  Her defense of this statement against the criticism it has received seems to miss, at the least, two obvious points.  First, that young men are not, in my experience subjected to hearing that they don't have the life experience to vote, much less with a side of condescension about what they do on the internet (and, frankly, their multitasking abilities.  These days portable internet-enabled devices are purchasable, so presumably, the presumed vapid young women could take them into places of polling without excessive loss of dating site time.  And given voting lines, why not?).  Second, that voting is a right that does not come subject to other people's judgy-ness.

This news person's justification is that deciding who to vote for is hard.  As I recall, on this ballot there were never more than three choices, and in several cases, no more than one.  Each person had a helpful indication of political party alignment, which is usually enough to give a good starting indication of the way the candidate, if elected, would go about being an elected person.  As a young woman, I face a far more bewildering variety of choices, with far less information, every time I buy lipstick.  I can't even imagine the hard choices I'd have to make if I used online dating sites.  Even if I eschewed information entirely and voted for the people with the silliest sounding names, Bruce Schneier (who is rather a hero of mine) postulates in Liars and Outliers that the most advantageous approach to voting for both the voters and the democracy is for people to vote, but without being informed.  No one would, I think, accuse Schneier of either lacking experience or being on dating sites, though I rather wish he would go in for investigating dating sites.  I'm sure he could break them fabulously and be entertaining and informative about their security flaws.

Butt-kicking Misogyny: Surely Female PCs in Baldur's Gate Will Only Want to Romance a Paladin-Want-to-Be!

The first step of character creation for all the Baldur's Gate series of computer games:

"Females of the Realms can excel in any area they wish, and are easily the equals of their male counterparts in every skill or respect."

In many respects, Black Isle programmers lived up to this promise.  I always play a female character, and I have greatly enjoyed every Baldur's Gate game I have finished.  

But even in nearly perfect computer games there are bugs, both accidental and deliberate.  Male PCs in Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal original programming (as opposed to add-in mods programmed by fans, of which I am a huge proponent) have three possible romance storylines in the game.  Female PCs have one.  Male PCs, depending on their choices, may romance a dark elf, a fighter/druid, or even impregnate a cleric/mage NPC.  Female PCs may romance the fighter/cleric paladin want-to-be NPC or no one at all.

When time or money ran short, it was the other two planned possible romances for the female PC that got cut.

I am a feminist for many reasons.  One of those reasons is that by the time I'm old, I want to see male and female choices cut equally when things must be cut.  I don't want women taking the bigger cut, and right now, we still are taking the bigger cut.  And things get better not by saying "Oh, well, count your blessings," but by saying, "Things are not equal, and we as human beings can change and do better."  Change in small things as well as big things.


Appendix: For a thoughtful and thorough take on women in games and gaming, you should be watching  Anita Sarkeesian's videos.