What Makes a Woman a Woman?

"While femininity may be relative — slipping and sliding depending on the age in which you live, your stage of life, what you’re wearing (quick: do tailored clothes underscore or undercut it?) even the height of the person standing next to you — biology, at least to some degree, is destiny, though it should make no never mind to women’s rights or progress....

"[I]dentity is not simply the sum of our parts. That’s what makes [Caster] Semenya — whose first name is usually conferred on a boy but happens to be Greek for “beaver” — so intriguing. Science may or may not be able to establish some medical truth about her, something that will be relevant on the playing field. But I doubt that will change who she considers herself to be."

-- PEGGY ORENSTEIN, "What Makes a Woman a Woman?"

(Found for Lauren on a Friday afternoon)

Where to Pass the Torch?

Michelle posted this essay, "Roe vs. Wade vs. My Boyfriend," a while ago. I didn't really know what to say about it but it certainly got me thinking again about reproductive rights. How far have we come since the 1970s? How much work is left to do? An article in the NYTimes puts everything in perspective... the outlook is not so great.

Would you put your life on the line to preserve women's right to abortions? (And is it your responsibility?)

Is this even worth saying?

The Vancouver Sun employs a handful of "legacy" columnists (old people) who have license to write whatever they want and no one will edit or fact check it--and many of the paper's readers will accept it as the ultimate authority. That's why the front section comes chock-loaded with nuggets of xenophobia, homophobia, and sexism, fully unchecked. Yesterday's front page headlines included: "Are you buying your clothes at a store that sells porn?"

The article was written by Daphne Bramham, the staff writer who has devoted years to covering the polygamous community of Bountiful, B.C. It's been a long time since I've seen her write about anything else and maybe she hasn't. The article reads as if she's never stepped into an American Apparel store in her life and some how has avoided the ubiquity of their ever more scandalous ads. And when a reader brings it to her attention, she is fully outraged and vows to never shop there again. This can't be a huge loss to AA, since the 50-65 set isn't their biggest market.

Braham writes about the company's ads, which are undoubtedly provocative. In the past few years, the ads have actually employed porn stars, and not AA employees. Something about the ads bothers me, which I'm not going to put my finger on yet because I know I'll get it wrong. Newsweek offers some thoughts and this troubling photograph of a billboard from NYC's Lower East Side (if you can't see the graffiti, click the image to enlarge).

More locally, brilliant Michelle [Have you read Michelle's blog? Go now!] has offered an opinion on Braham's article and condemns the writer's unfounded moral outrage at AA's merchandising:

"I hate that this woman basically says American Apparel should be condemned for promoting “soft-core ponography” even though it’s sweatshop-free labour, thus reinforcing a horribly skewed North American value system that finds nipples and cocks more offensive than sweatshop labour. I just don’t really get why sex is so offensive. Any kid shopping at American Apparel has probably already cruised porn on het internet; clearly it’s a good marketing strategy; clearly pornography will never be defeated by moral outrage because EVERYONE LIKES LOOKING AT ATTRACTIVE NAKED PEOPLE."

Still, Braham does one thing right which is to bring attention to the way Charney runs his company and interacts with his female employees:

"Charney masturbated several times and even had oral sex in front of journalist Claudine Ko, who wrote about it in July 2004 for now defunct Jane magazine*

Charney makes no apologies for calling female employees the C-word or sluts. The employee handbook warns that employees working in creative areas "will come into contact with sexually charged language and visual images. This is part of the job."

Charney, who frequently wears only underwear in the workplace, has had five sexual harassment suits against him in the past three years. Four have been settled. In the one filed in June 2008, the employee says Charney ordered her to simulate masturbation in front of him. When the woman refused, Charney got her supervisor to do it.

There's a total lack of transparency in the way that AA runs their business and I cannot believe that it has not been fully verified of any of these charges are legitimate.

To be on the safe (and cheap side), I think I may be staying away from AA; it's "sweatshop free" label is not enough to make me want to buy a $26 t-shirt, or interact with intolerably smug employees. I'll also have to buy my copy of BUTT somewhere else.

*I found a copy of the Jane article here.

Lynn Barber has something to say to you young women

Barber, regular contributor to the Guardian and former contributor to Penthouse offers her opinion.

I was brought up to believe, and still believe, that who you marry is the most important choice you make in life. Does that make me anti-feminist? I don't think so, because I believe it's as true for men as it is for women. You can't be happy if you're married to the wrong person.

Being older and already married, I could only watch with bemusement as feminism went through its florid evolutionary stages in the Seventies - the 'all men are rapists' phase, the Andrea Dworkin compulsory boiler suit phase, the bra-burning, picketing Miss World phase, the sitting-in-a-circle-inspecting-your-vagina-in-a-mirror phase. But I was very aware in the Eighties of the 'having it all' phase when women were supposed to 'juggle' career and motherhood. I was aware of it because I was actually doing it at the time but I never thought juggling babies was a good idea. What it actually involved was permanent exhaustion and permanent guilt.

The problem for young women is, as it always has been, an economic one - that just when they need to be pushing ahead with their careers and earning decent money is also when they need to be having babies. It worries me that so many young women now choose to defer the babies, thinking they can somehow magic them up by IVF when they are in their forties. Often they can't, so they have no children to console them when their much-vaunted careers end in redundancy. In an ideal society, I believe, couples would have children young, preferably in their early twenties, when they're energetic and flexible enough to live on little money, and then start the serious career-building in their thirties when the children are at school. The present recession might actually make that easier - if there are no careers for 20-somethings to pursue, they might think it is quite a good idea to have babies instead.

Excuse me, I have to go have babies now because I don't have a job.

Naomi Wolf on the Third Wave