Driving While Aroused

posted tonight on allied as well:

A Longview, Texas woman was arrested for having 17 sex toys in her car, according to this article. If convicted, she could face two years in jail. Notice, will you, that she was stopped for suspicion of DUI. And yet, what is the news angle of this story? The fact that the woman was allegedly driving drunk and could have killed someone's child is not discussed because it's not "news." It's America. What is news is that this woman works as a distributor for Slumber Parties, which is described as Tuperware meets Victoria Secret. Apparently, that just ain't lady like in Texas, ya'll.

What Ever Happened To Feminism?

I'm having lunch with four really bright guys at work and one says, apropos of the Victoria's Secret Lingerie Show on CBS the night before, "What Ever Happened To Feminism?" And I say, "It's over," and then I say, "and you guys are in big, big trouble."

This brings the appetizer munching to a slow halt. I start to explain. We entered the work force in the 70's in those ridiculous women's suits with bowties. We wanted a level playing field. We wanted to play fair. We wanted the same opportunities and privileges men got. We won a few of those, but mostly we lost and we weren't taken seriously. We cried "foul" with sexual harrassment in the 80's and 90's and then the game changed completely. We went back to basics. We found our old power -- girl power -- and we added that to what we'd learned from men. So now we knew how to be professional but we also remembered how to be subversive, subversively female, subversively feminine.

"There is no more feminism," I explain. Game Over. But it took me a day or two to name the new game. It's "girlism" -- women want to be sexy girls and use all the tricks girls use. Crying, flirting, begging, winking, stomping their feet when they don't get their way, general trotting around showing off their long legs and whatever else they decide to show off thereby distracting and derailing men.

It's about power -- the girl power we've always had, but forgot about, combined with all the stuff we've learned in the workplace. Needless to say, if you're a man and you call us on it, we deny it. The new double double standard. We learned how to stop playing fair.

Violence and the Miss World Pageant

I'm not at all sure what remarks to make about this article, given the variety of issues here, except this: tragic.

Metaphorically Maternal

Among his ongoing commentaries about the politics and poker in America today, bix links to Ellen Goodman’s article about Nancy Pelosi – but he left out something Goodman said that I’d like to highlight.

Goodman says
It's barely a week since Nancy Pelosi became minority leader, and there's already been a regime change of metaphors. Out with sports; in with food…… On ''Meet the Press,'' the woman who became head of the Democratic Household cheerily compared her postelection fate to the patriotic poultry…… ''You know the story. It's like the Thanksgiving turkey,'' she said. ''You bring it out, you get this great honor, everybody oohs and ahs ... and then they begin to carve you up.'

Having worked for almost twenty years for the CEO of a government agency division who is a woman and who made a point of using non-sports metaphors, I saw how a corporate culture is affected by the metaphorical language used by its leader. My former boss tends to use family and home-based metaphors, which reflect a collaborative, sibling approach to management. Most of the managers reporting to her are men, and their tendency is to use sports metaphors, which reflect competitive, hierarchical values. Over the years, her metaphors have reinforced the management messages she tries to communicate. The culture of the organization has become such that employees from other parts of the agency keep looking for job openings with her operation. And, under her leadership, the units for which she is responsible have gained great respect and support from the government agencies that provide her funding.

Language. Voice. Metaphor. More powerful than the sword -- for both good and ill.
(double posted on my own blog)

holiday gift idea - to benefit breast and ovarian cancer research

I heard about this calendar at work and thought it looked like a great gift idea for the holidays. Proceeds benefit breast cancer and ovarian cancer research, and the cost seems pretty reasonable.



Joyce Ostin, a professional photographer and cancer survivor did the photography. She took these photos in the homes of celebrities who are supporting breast cancer awareness, like Julianna Margulies, Peggy Lipton, Kyra Sedgwick, and others. Pretty cool.

News on women in technology.

http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2002/11/18/story3.html

From Bizjournals.com, comments on women that are currently holding key positions in technology related corporations.

Solitude vs. Company

Charles Murtaugh cites Caitlin Flanagan on what women apparently crave:

The photography in her [Martha Stewart] various publications seems to reduce all of female longing to its essential elements. A basket of flowers, a child's lawn pinafore draped across a painted rocking chair, an exceptionally white towel folded in thirds and perched in glamorous isolation on a clean and barren shelf: most of the pictures feature a lot of sunlight, and many show rooms that are either empty of people or occupied solely by Martha, evoking the profound and enduring female desires for solitude and silence. No heterosexual man can understand this stuff, and no woman with a beating heart and an ounce of femininity can resist it.

He comments:

I'll take her word for it. And perhaps women will take my word that many men, at least the men I know, crave almost precisely the opposite: not solitude, but company, and specifically the company of other men.

Are women really such lone wolves? Or are we just saying that we are in order to exert our independence?

Looking for "Normal People Are Not Exceptional"

I'm trying to find where I can get a copy of this film as a holiday present for my son b!X. I guess it played on the International Channel; I don't get it and he missed it. And he can't locate it anywhere through Net searches. Anyone out there know?

Is this for real?

Restrooms of the Future.

31 years of being a woman, and I had no idea this was possible!

New Yahoo Group

I have been unhappy with the blog groups available, So i am starting a new one.



Click to subscribe to Blogging_Community


I am attempting to create a group that you actually want to join and stay in.

Girl Culture

Found via the illustrious Mena Trott, is an online photo essay based on the Lauren Greenfield book Girl Culture. I thought it was intriguing:

"If I don't dress well, I feel geeky. And if I feel nice, I feel like people like me. Fashionable clothing is way better and cool."
- Lily, 6 years old

"Everybody's got to make fun of somebody else. People make fun of me all the time because I'm overweight. It's just something you try to hide from, I guess. You don't want other people to see."
- Lisa, 13 years old

"I know I play into that image out there, but I try to say it is a fantasy. I look at my own pictures and wish I could look like that."
- Cindy Margolis, "The World's Most Downloaded Woman"

"I have really mixed feelings about the story of Cinderella. Of course, it's every girl's dream to find Prince Charming and marry and have a nice life. But Cinderella can't do anything for herself. She's dependent on the fact that Prince Charming's gonna come and take her, and if it weren't for him she would probably stay there, you know?"
- Ruby, 15 years old

Poignant stuff.

Invitation

I would like to invite fellow blog sisters to visit my blog. BlogData
If you read my posts you'll find blog related content, news, links, resources, and discussion. Please feel free to send me articles or news. I enjoy networking within the blogging community. My blog has a personal/professional feel with mixed content its on the techie side without being pretentious or nerdy.

Interact!!! Thanks

Blogger in Wonderland

I am here but I don't really understand. I clicked the invitation link, entered my account name and password then suddenly I am at the post page.

Well, I guess I am in now and I will figure it out from here.

Juggling frogs

After months of languishing on the sidebar link list, Blogger has finally given me write access to BlogSisters. So, hi there!

I'm currently travelling in Southeast Asia, where women's lives are rather different to the one I led in Brooklyn. Here's a taste from Vietnam, taken from When Heaven and Earth Changed Places by Le Ly's Hayslip. The spirit, if not the substance, may ring true for working mothers in the west.

'In the north, an unusual rice festival among minority groups involves a competition between unmarried women. The task is to cook a pot of rice, suspended from a pole attached to the woman's back by a sash. Each woman must quickly chew a stick of sugarcane to produce fiber for the fire, then balance a pot of rice over the fire. To make the task more difficult, each woman is also given an infant to hold and must contain a frog with a 1.5-meter diameter circle around the fire. The winner is the one who makes the best-tasting rice in the shortest time, keeps the frog contained, and sufficiently soothes the terrified infant.'

play's the thing....

RageBoy’s post about playing, which links to several other playful male bloggers, affirmed what I was feeling all along in reading some of those posts on these guys’ weblogs. I don’t play the way these guys play, so their play doesn’t seem very playful to me. And I have a feeling that other women bloggers (and non-) feel the same way. Boys tend to love rough and tumble, sucker punches, messy wrestle on the ground get dirt in your mouth play. These male bloggers are playing like that metaphorically. Girls tend not to play the same way as boys. And women tend not to play like men.

So that’s why, when I read this, I think, wow, good blogging, great writing. But when I read some of his other stuff, I think, what a waste of time.

As I read some of the posts at Blog Sisters, I don't see much playfulness. What do we sound like when we're being playful? And why aren't we moreso in our blogs?

Personally, I suspect it's because while the boys are out playing, we're the ones who are dealing with the stuff of every day life survival that's not so much fun. Maybe if we had more support for those things from the men in our lives (and in "life" in general), we'd be more inclined to play more, and our weblogs would reflect this. But I still don't think our play would sound - or feel -- the same as that of our male friends. What do you think?

(double posted on kalilily.net.)

don't forget...

i love the recent posts here, from six-foot woman to bouncer/superhero combo. Where else you gonna find out about these things? That's all. That's all I have to add here this week. The only other thing I want to say is please, answer any or all of the questions on the Blog Sisters Survey, or write your own women and blogging ideas, and send me your thoughts.... good weekend all!

jeneane

Terrifica to the Rescue

Topping Blogdex today is the story of a woman in NYC who dresses up as a superhero, hangs around bars, and intervenes when women too far into their cups look like they're about to be taken advantage of. I'm such a nerd, I think it's almost cooler that someone's willing to walk around regularly in mask/cape/boots, but what she's doing seems to be good-hearted, if a little odd and maybe heavy-handed and extreme (and I have to admit, I'm still wondering if it's some kind of hoax-- she even has a velvet-wearing "supervillain" counterpart called Fantastico who likes to be a ladies' man). The article states she created the idea of the superhero character after arriving alone in NYC and feeling vulnerable to the advances of men as a single 20-something. Seems like she prefers the single life to dating games:

"To feel like you have to go to a bar, to put yourself out there, feeling like you have worth only when you're married, engaged, or have a boyfriend, that's weakness," Terrifica says. "People are happiest when they're alone and living their solitary lives."

I find it hard to agree with that last statement, but I'm sure there are at least a few women she's talked to who have avoided some morning-after dread.

Lingerie Barbie

The Lingerie Barbie is stirring up a fuss. On the local news last night a furious dad stated he refused to buy the product for his Barbie-loving daughter (it looked like she had just about everything Barbie, including a house) and he was shocked to see it in the FAO Schwarz catalog. I found it odd that there wasn't much focus on the fact that the toy was recommended for 14 year olds and older (his daughter must have been about 7 or so).

I've long been a big UN-fan of Barbie in general, but this new model doesn't bother me so much-- she's kind of just a blatant example of what, to me, Barbie is about anyway. The angry dad on the news was upset about the sexual suggestiveness of the toy, but apparently has no problem letting his daughter play with lots of blonde, unrealistically shaped dolls that promote sexism in a more insidious way. Is this your idea of femininity? I don't want to come down too hard on Barbie dolls. I had one (and only one, and she got pretty beat up) and other dolls as a little girl. But I also had Legos, an electrical circuit experimentation kit, a microscope, etc., etc., and so on. With the Barbie franchise putting out products in the past like a credit card Barbie and a talking Barbie that said, "Math is hard!" it's hard to see how Barbies are supposed to be taken seriously or especially edifying for kids anyway.

Counselling Teens in (Potentially?) Abusive Relationships

I'm trying to collect some online resources about unhealthy and emotionally abusive relationships. I'm involved in a community forum that seems to have a great deal of teenage girls. I never really took notice before, but ever since they implemented a special topic area for teens, I've been disturbed by the relationships a number of these girls are describing. They are so incredibly desperate and clingy. One, and I'm not exaggerating, went into a panic and blamed herself because she called her boyfriend while he was driving, and the cops started following him. Another, it seems to me, is 6 months away from "he hit me, but I made him so mad and he didn't mean it and he loves me soooo much."

I've found some resources about emotional abuse - symptoms, signs of an abuser, etc. - but while I recognize these characteristics, I'm not sure these girls would. Does anyone have any good resources? Maybe even just on self-esteem, dealing with a cheater, long distance relationships, etc. Preferrably focused on teen relationships.

Thanks in advance!

Gender Gap: Boys Lagging

This story from 60 Minutes, about the growing trend in girls academically outperforming boys, was brought up by a student in my class recently. It struck me when I heard the story broadcast (I sometimes listen to a television program on the radio), that the performance issue is interesting when one considers that there continues to be a lag in women's earnings. An excerpt from the story:

"Why aren’t boys’ academic problems a bigger issue? “There's a little cultural secret at work here. Boys go out in the work world and earn more money,” says Thompson. “Nobody wants to admit what's happening, which is, 'You girls work very hard, but sorry, ladies, when you get out there, we're not going to pay you equally. And you boys, it's OK. You can loaf through school. You'll get good jobs afterwards.'”