women

This post comes after day of hell being super Nanny to a family, a new one, who, while I do love these kids, think their parents are great and enjoy my job, I also just cant help but shake my head at how much these kids have, how little they know about the world outside of their very nice four walls. Sometimes I have to catch myself while doing this and question whether my feelings are fair or if this is how we should all have been as children, but because my life was such a contrast to theirs I just cant seem to work out my feelings on this.

I was raised very aware of what goes on the world, the good, the bad and the ugly. Some of it unfortunatly I learnt the hard way, being abused etc. But the rest was because my parents were very open with us about such things. My dad especially took us to protests, friends houses who were going through crisis and it was always explained to us what was going on, sometimes I must admit this was overwhelming and probably a bit inappropriate for the age I was at the time. But most of the time, I think it was okay, good in fact, as by the time I went to high school I was very aware of the issues in not only my community, but in many parts of the world. I guess though, that my Dad being so relaxed about me interacting with people, trusting people and trusting that I knew dangerous from safe situations a little more than I did at age 11 was really how I got hurt in the first place.

With the exception of my books, I have a very modest media collection. I just don't spend that much time watching television and movies or listening to music. However, I am interested in women and supporting us in every way I can. So, given my commitment to women and feminism, how is it that my modest media collection is primarily composed of men's works?

I'm not trying to argue that men aren't worth watching, reading, listening to, or otherwise supporting; men do create some wonderful things, worth the investment of my time and money. I'll never be willingly separated from East of Eden, and my love of Tom Petty appears to be limitless, but how have men and their creations taken up so much more of my shelf space than women and our creations?

At Scarleteen I routinely hear from young women who are feeling insecure about their boyfriend's use of porn. For me, what stands out about these women is the pressure they feel to satisfy every one of their partners sexual needs. That pressure appears to be internal - their partners are described as quite comfortable with an independent sexuality, e.g. their use of porn and masturbation. I've always thought of these women as unnecessarily jealous, making a big deal out of something relatively minor. It's not like they were taking a feminist stand against porn -- they just didn't want their partners using it.

Just a short entry to note the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister of Pakistan.

The first woman to be voted leader of a Muslim country, and one of the few female heads of state in general.

There's a lot to be said about Bhutto, her politics, and her leadership but for me the key fact is another strong, outspoken woman is gone.

Sunday I watched a woman rip down the hill on her snowboard. Last weekend she was easily the strongest female snowboarder out there, but while she is indeed awesome, there just isn't much competition. Sitting in the chairlift with one of the many skilled men that ride out there, I started to wonder just why more women don't ski or snowboard.

Later that night I came here and read Joey's post in the forums:

And this is really a pattern with me, too. For as far as I can think back, I've had at least one really close guy friend, and more often than not, I was closer with that guy than I was with any of my girl friends. It's really only been very recently that I've formed really strong bonds with female friends.

So, I'd like to talk about my job a little bit. I've been working at a domestic violence shelter for two weeks now, after nearly two months of being unemployed. Despite knowing going in that I'd have to get a second job because the pay is too low to cover my bills and that I wouldn't be receiving any benefits, I was incredibly excited when they hired me. Hopefully it goes without saying that I'm interested in working with women to help them improve their lives in any way I can.

After two weeks though, I'm not longer looking for a part-time job, I'm looking for a new one. I wanted to help empower women, to offer support as they made difficult transitions. Instead my responsibilities include reminding adult women that they are not allowed to eat in the living room and monitoring what time they get up in the morning. Nearly every one of my coworkers has compared this job to babysitting and that's exactly what it feels like.

This is an article about the personal experiences of the author at a liberal arts college in Minnesota. It was especially meaningful to me because I am a student at a liberal arts college, and I see many of the things the author discusses in my own academic environment.

It’s a delicate thing, coming to the moment when you realize that your perceptions do count and that your writing can encompass them. You begin to understand how quiet, how subtle the writer’s authority really is, how little it has to do with “authority” as we usually use the word.

The older I get, the less I seem to understand about the world and life in general. At five my life was about being close to my loved ones, being outdoors as much as possible and making new friends. Now I guess I really dont understand people a whole lot at all. I dont understand why men rape and beat their wives who they once fell in love with, I dont understand why children are starving and cold on the streets when there are people out shopping who already own twenty pairs of pants, I dont understand why parents are putting their children on medications to make them behave when really they are just not wanting to parent. But what makes me so angry and so confused about is how people can see all of this happening everyday and turn away from it, understand it or not, its there in our faces and it is our responsibility to turn this all around while we still can, and people just dont want to.

The weekend was a whirlwind of drunk days and drunker nights, people I dont know sleeping on the floor of our apartment, someone I know even less sleeping next to me in my bed. At the time it was all a fantastic idea, who doesnt love a weekend where they can just let loose and party day and night? But come monday I was not proud of myself. I had not been sober for seventy two hours and the reality of that hit me, hard, harder than a headache and a shakey morning. I do this to myself more than I should. Its easier for me to be drunk then sober, a lot of the time, and that is something I am not proud of, but its the truth.

Immigrant Detention is the Fastest-Growing Form of incarceration in the United States. As it stands now, over 27,000 immigrants are detained on any given day in close to 200 prison-like facilities across the country. Immigrant detention is called “detention” because detainees are not being held for criminal charges. Immigrants are the only group of people in the United States that are routinely held in jail for civil offenses. On the other hand, while immigrant detainees are held for lesser offenses, they can be held indefinitely, and lack the legal protections as people being charged with crimes enjoy, such as the right to free legal counsel.

Today I got in the car in the pouring rain and sat in the drivers seat wondering where shall I go? It's the first whole day off I have had in a while and with all my friend's back at university I really was at a loss for what to do today. So I decided to drive out to the country to visit my Nana's grave to say goodbye before I leave to Canada in a few week's. I hadn't visited her there in a long time and as I drove out there I was thinking about her the whole time. And it made me think how sad it is the way we remember people. She died when I was 12 years old, after a long battle with cancer. I remember how much everyone at the funeral kept saying what a great wife and mother she was, and how nice she was, and thinking they were right, but also that they are all forgetting what an amazing Woman she was and how those things they all were saying did not do her justice.

*Disclaimer: This may be jarring to read--it discusses my experience as a concentration camp in Germany.

I just came back from a visit to a concentration camp in Northern Germany. It was the second one I've been to, but we had a guided tour which really changed how I saw the camp. It never gets easy to go to a place like a camp, but today felt different. The camp itself was stark--it had been a prison after it was a camp, and now it served as a memorial.

There were fields of lush grass spotted with dandelions, and I thought they were pretty, until our guide started describing how corpses were burned in the camp's crematorium and the ashes were spread for fertilizer.

Hej!
I'm looking forward to being around here more-I'm in Denmark for the semester, and it's been an interesting time. I'm learning more about authentic Danishness, and I've had some face-to-face confrontations with it, including one that I'm writing this blog about. :)

I was at a dinner party last weekend, all women just having dinner and drinking wine and eating together. It was a nice evening. We were having a conversation, and sex came up. The women were all extremely candid, speaking openly about sex, and it was interesting to me. Primarily because it was focused around women's pleasure. In other words, the conversation wasn't solely about what you can do for your partner, but about how frustrating it can be when your needs don't get met. All the women were heterosexual, so all the partners they talked about were male, but I could see the contrast between me and my own friends immediately. I can rarely remember a conversation about sex that was woman-centric. I think to a large extent it's a cultural difference. Me and my friends were never raised with any conception that healthy sexual activity where pleasure was given and received was something we should expect, much less demand. Most of the women I have met here don't think that way.

My christmas wishlist this year consisted almost solely of feminist literature. Books written by, for and about women. Books I'd heard or read about in the past few months and that had roused my interest. The two books I received are the autobiography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (which I have blogged about previously) and a book by author Thea Dorn, who interviewed 11 women who shape German media and politics. This last book I started reading even before the gift-unwrapping-process was finished and I literally haven't put it down since. It's absolutely awesome and inspiring in more ways than I could list. And suddenly, as I was reading the interview with Charlotte Roche (VJane I have also mentioned previously) this morning it hit me: These women are my sisters. And dammit, we rock.

Susan Basow, the scholar most beloved by my Gender and Politics professor, called out the biggest obstacles to female-female friendships. One of them was competition for "high-status males" (uh, what). Another was the nuclear family (or its quivalent.

What Basow doesn't tell you is that the opposite is also true, that the break down of that competition and the failure of that family set-up (kids or no kids, married or unmarried, hetero- or homosexual) can really endorse and encourage those relationships we neglect.

My silence at the AGA can be attributed to a number of excuses: classes, exams, graduation, work, fights with my boyfriend; feminist issues seem to fade in the personal drama ("the personal is political" who?). While I see an opening for further discussion already (the nuclear family or the pursuit of it impedes female-female friendships and--gasp--feminism!), I mean to take a moment for a little gratitude.