I’m off to synagogue today and hence it will likely be quiet over here from me. But before I go, I wanted to share this eerie yet haunting song by Leonard Cohen that I heard on NPR’s Speaking of Faith Days of Awe special the other day and haven’t been able to get out of my head. It’s a riff on a prayer (Unetaneh Tokef) that is said on Rosh HaShanah as well as on Yom Kippur. Though sad and a little creepy, it sure gets stuck in your head.

The text of the prayer that it draws from is translated as follows:

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted.

Terrifying. Yet what I like about these holidays is that they are pretty much full of hope. The liturgy tends to emphasize human responsibility and the possibility for change.

May this new year bring change for us as individuals, communities, and nations. And may our leaders in Washington DC come together on some kind of plan before things get much worse.

The sweetness of apples and honey to all!

For all those of you who’ve had a taste of the blogosphere and want to learn more, either on behalf of your organization or as an individual, this one’s for you.

Girl w/ Keyboard: Making Waves through the Feminist Blogosphere (Strategic Blogging for Advocates, Experts, and Organizations)

In this 5-week bloginar offered through the Women’s Media Center, author and blogger Deborah Siegel (aka moi) will lead participants through the basics of blogging—both logistical and philosophical.  Participants will leave with an understanding of how blogging is changing the media landscape—especially for women—and the tools needed to start a blog or improve one that’s already off the ground.  Topics include: State of the Blogosphere, Tour of the Femosphere, Finding Your Niche, Creating Your Blog, Rules of the Road, Bells and Whistles, and more.

About the Instructor

[ok, this is weird posting this part here on GWP, but what the hey — Kristen writes the nicest things about me!] Transforming her own blog, Girl with Pen, into required reading for the up-to-date feminist, Deborah has successfully created a presence in the world of Web 2.0.  Deborah now keeps a daily web community in dialogue on the latest debates surrounding intergenerational feminism and research on women and girls across academic and popular realms.  In this online workshop, Deborah, a graduate of the first class of the WMC’s Progressive Women’s Voices program, will take you on a guided tour through the blogosphere and teach you how to get your voice and ideas out there, too. For more on Deborah, visit www.deborahsiegel.net.

Details

5 Tuesdays; dates TBD. For More Info
girlwpen@gmail.com

This just got passed along to me: The National Women’s Law Center is hosting a series of webinars (yep, that means, online! you can participate from anywhere) on how to negotiate for yourself in the workplace:

WORK$MART: Pay Negotiation for Women (Two-Part Series)

Did you know that men are four times more likely to initiate salary
negotiations than women? And that a worker stands to lose more than
$500,000 by age 60 if she fails to negotiate her first salary?

Two-Part Webinar:
1:00 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2008, and
1:00 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2008

During these workshops you will learn:
* How to benchmark the salary of your current job;
* How to determine whether or not you are paid fairly; and
* How to negotiate a raise or promotion.

Register Here

Live, from George Washington last Thursday, it’s Girl w/ Pen and two of the young women from the Women’s Leadership Program. (Am I really that short?!) Those WLP gals are not only gorgeous, they’re whip smart. The WomenGirlsLadies and I had an amazing time during the Q&A part of our panel that evening — the questions we got could have kept us all going all night.

Tina Fey does Palin, pitch perfect once again. Amy Poehler here as Katie Couric. Enjoy!

Deborah here. Last night Gloria Feldt, Kristal Brent Zook, Courtney Martin and I spoke together at George Washington University’s Elizabeth J. Somers Women’s Leadership Program and I have to say, we all feel tremendously encouraged by the amazing women we met there and just a bit proud of our own little quartet for prompting such great questions and reflections from the audience. Topics of conversation during the Q&A included: race vs. gender in the election, work/family balance, public policy approaches to rape and sexual assault, “opting out,” dealing with anti-feminist crap from insecure boys, beauty standards and their sources, abortion, equality vs. elevating women above men, women in politics, intersection feminism etc.

Thank you to Dean Heller, Sam, and all those that joined us in the conversation. The future is looking pretty bright…This pic is from a previous talk, but photos from GW coming soon!

(crossposted at WomenGirlsLadies)

Sex and Sensibility: Quick Takes
by Kristen Loveland

Hi to all from your Sex and Sensibility lady here. Here are a few things that caught my eye this past week:

1. The Truth About Teen Girls: Belinda Luscombe has an awesome article in Time Magazine talking about how, despite the proliferation of sexual imagery in the teenage world, maybe we shouldn’t be twisting our knickers in such a knot over their alleged sexual promiscuity. To wit:

“With the pornucopia of media at teens’ disposal in the past decade and a half, on cell phones and computers as well as TVs, early-adolescent sex should be having a growth spurt. But the figures don’t necessarily support one. Despite a minor increase in 2006, the rate of pregnancies among teen girls has been on a downward trend since 1991. Another indicator, the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, is alarmingly high: nearly 1 in 4 girls ages 14 to 19 and nearly 1 in 2 African-American girls, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But this is the first year such a study has been completed, and the study doesn’t separate 14-to-16-year-olds from 17-to-19-year-olds, so it’s still unclear which way that trend is heading.”

Keep reading this fantastic article here and thanks to Deborah for sending this to me!

2. I Am Charlotte: The Series: While on the one hand it appears that there are finally a number of voices asking us to put on the breaks for a second and contemplate what the actual sexual experiences of teenage girls are, it looks like Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons is going to be made into an HBO series. Charlotte Simmons the book has often been noted as over-stated and over-bearing in its condemnation of college sexuality. As the New York Magazine Book Review put it at the time:

“Wolfe’s vision of eroticism is ultimately too dark. When, in Charlotte Simmons, an older man has sex with a younger woman, it is, of course, cynical. But when a younger man has sex with a younger woman, it is equally cynical. Indeed, all the sex in Wolfe’s imagined university is rotten. All intimacy is rotten. At the end of the novel, Charlotte falls in with a new man. He comes from a very different walk of life than Charlotte does, and to all appearances he adores her. One might reasonably see this turn of events as a triumph—love conquering differences, love opening doors. But Wolfe intends for us to see it as a defeat: The man is not suited for his clever country heroine; she has forgotten, he suggests, that “she is Charlotte Simmons”; she has lost her identity.”

To put it mildly, I’m not overly-optimistic about the way the series will portray yet another young woman who has lost her character to the hedonistic offerings of that Gomorrah now known as the American university.

3. The Old is New Again: And finally, on a slightly different note, Ann over at Feministing recently wrote about John LaBruzzo, a state legislator from Louisiana, who wants to pay low-income women to be sterilized. Something that is consistently overlooked in mainstream’s take on what it means to be Pro-Choice is that it is just that: the choice to have or not to have a child. As a political position, it is both concerned with those woman who, for x, y, and z reason, choose not to have a child, and with those from whom the right to have a child is coercively taken away. There have been a number of studies and histories done on sterilization abuse which, particularly in 1970s America, targeted poor and minority women, and included everything from outright nonconsensual sterilizations, to unclear statements signed on the hospital bed before an abortion, to, well, something like LaBruzzo’s brilliant idea. The government has no place in coercing a targeted group of women into permanent reproductive decisions.

One mo’ from Courtney…

I think for me it was a slow process, starting from when I was in the womb…

We were reading the Great Gatsby in high school English, and I came across this line: ‘That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’ I felt enraged, but none of my classmates even seemed to notice.

It was a rainy Take Back The Night rally my first year of college… I looked around at the women on every side, and thought about how strange it was that I’d ended up here, given my conservative Republican upbringing. I realized that if I don’t identify as a feminist, no one really does.

One movie: Girls Town. Amazing.

A generation ago, feminists talked about their “click” moments: those split-second experiences that led them to join the women’s movement. Today’s young feminists come to the movement–which is looking less like a protest march and more like a blog–in myriad, often piecemeal, ways. It can be as simple as reading a book or attending an event or talking with one person or witnessing a horrendous act of sexism.

Deciding to identify as a feminist often requires a lot of learning and unlearning these days; so many of us have been exposed to the well-oiled machine of the anti-feminist movement. According to Newsweek, feminism might be dead. Charlotte Allen tells us that we’re stupid, via the Washington Post. Some older women within our own movement wonder if we even exist.

J. Courtney Sullivan and Courtney Martin are editing a new anthology for Seal Press on the topic, and we want your ideas. Send us a couple of paragraphs–in the style and voice that you’d use in a full-fledged essay–proposing what you would write, along with your name, email address, phone #, age, and ethnic background (we understand that this might seem a little reductive, but we are committed to including diverse authors). We’ll look them all over, then get back to you once we’ve accounted for a range of moments, perspectives, and cultural backgrounds.

We hope it will be a historic document, a totally entertaining gift, a course adoption text, and, most of all, a collection that makes young women who already identify with the movement feel seen and heard, and welcomes all those just growing into the still unfolding story of feminism.

Send your ideas to: clickmoment@gmail.com
DEADLINE: October 15, 2008

Bonus: We’ve already got some great feminist writers on board that you may have heard of, including (in no particular order):

Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan (well, obviously)
Jessica Valenti
Miriam Perez
Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Curtis Sittenfield
Rebecca Traister
Anna Holmes
Rachel Simmons
Winter Miller
Deborah Siegel
Alissa Quart
Hannah Seligson
Latoya Petersen
Shelby Knox
Jennifer Baumgardner
Amy Richards

We’ve just finished our panel at George Washington’s Elizabeth J. Somers Women’s Leadership Program and I have to say, we all feel tremendously encouraged by the amazing women we met there and just a bit proud of our own little quartet for prompting such great questions and reflections from the audience. Topics of conversation during the Q&A included: race vs. gender in the election, work/family balance, public policy approaches to rape and sexual assault, “opting out,” dealing with anti-feminist crap from insecure boys, beauty standards and their sources, abortion, equality vs. elevating women above men, women in politics, intersection feminism etc.

Thank you to Dean Heller and all those that joined us in the conversation. The future is looking pretty bright…