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Mary Wollstonecraft, a founding grandmother of liberal feminism who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), focused on how to improve the status of women (middle-class, white British women, that is) by revising education and transforming marriage. She writes of love,

Love, the common passion, in which chance and sensation take place of choice and reason, is, in some degree, felt by the mass of mankind; for it is not necessary to speak, at present, of the emotions that rise above or sink below love. This passion, naturally increased by suspense and difficulties, draws the mind out of its accustomed state, and exalts the affections; but the security of marriage, allowing the fever of love to subside, a healthy temperature is thought insipid, only by those who have not sufficient intellect to substitute the calm tenderness of friendship, the confidence of respect, instead of blind admiration, and the sensual emotions of fondness.

Down with romance, says Wollstonecraft. To liberate women and men, marriage should be stripped of passion. She argued, in effect, that doing so would offset the way that marriage starts as a cartoon of manly men adoring delicate women of great beauty and not much more (because of the limits of women’s education that Wollstonecraft deplored). To wit, the hero of her unfinished novel, Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman, is remembered above all for her line, “marriage has bastilled me for life.” (Bastille being the 1790s equivalent of Occupy today.)

Now to my story: Today in the New York Times, Matt Richtel develops his thought experiment for how to liberate marriage from that bastille experience. He proposes to a set of family researchers the notion of a 20-year marriage contract in “Till Death, or 20 Years, Do Us Part.”

Seems like everyone he interviewed thought marriage—and ideas about marriage—could use some revision. Pepper Schwartz ripely noted, “We’re remarkably not innovative about marriage even though almost all the environmental conditions, writ large, have changed…We haven’t scrutinized it. We’ve been picking at it like a scab, and it’s not going to heal that way.” The upshot was that marriage still is Occupied, and in important ways a prison for our imaginations.

My own proposal focused on getting rid of a lot of marriage fantasies that are represented in the commercial hype around marriage—very Wollstonecraft-ish, right? There might be something to that: wedding hype seems to bring out a lot of the gender cartoons that Wollstonecraft railed against. But is that anti romantic? Not in the way that I mean it.

I don’t think that getting rid of old-school marriage fantasies means not being romantic, not being hopeful, not being tender, committed, loyal, tolerant of bad days, exuberant about good days. What interests me are ways to cultivate romance and commitment in a context where partners recognize that the choice to participate in marriage, to remain, day in and day out, is something that makes it more fantastic, not less. Marriage, in this view, becomes mindful. And the reality is that marriage is a choice day in and day out, for a lot of reasons cogently reviewed in Matt Richtel’s column.

Same-sex partners, who until recently haven’t had access to marriage, have often been forced to forge more imaginative, more mindful unions. Now, as we edge towards marriage equality, everyone gets to see unions that take the sweet traditions of marriage, the fun, the legitimacy, and the somber commitment of it, but perhaps less often encumbered with the baggage of the bastille Wollstonecraft spoke of in heterosexual marriage.

As for me: I’m not married. When I was married, my vows included none of that “till death do you part” stuff; instead we pledged to remain interesting to each other. And we did. Till the day my husband died. And then some.

-Virginia Rutter

As many in the U.S. anticipate October “going pink” for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I’m honored to feature a guest post by Gayle A. Sulik MA, PhD, Research Associate at the University at Albany (SUNY) and founder of the Breast Cancer Consortium, an international partnership committed to energizing the scientific and public discourse about breast cancer and to promoting collaborative initiatives.  She was a 2008 Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and recently won the 2013 Sociologists for Women in Society Feminist Lecturer Award for her book, Pink Ribbon Blues: How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines Women’s Health (Oxford University Press).*

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I too used to secretly look forward to October, when I would drape myself in pride with all manner of garish pink, survivor-emblemed merchandise and take my place in the Survivors circle whilst bopping out to “We Are Family” or whatever the cheesy designated anthem was for that year, at one of the many breast cancer fundraising walks.

But I’m not doing it this year or ever again. It’s just a load of bollocks and a great excuse for companies to market their products to the well-meaning consumer in the guise of “Breast Cancer Awareness” when all it really boils down to is profiteering at the expense of real people really suffering and really dying from this insidious disease.

— Rachel Cheetham Moro,
The Cancer Culture Chronicles, Sep. 19, 2009

Rachel Cheetham Moro used to write a lot about the bollocks of breast cancer on her blog, The Cancer Culture Chronicles, which she published from June 2009 until her death, from metastatic breast cancer, in February 2012.

Though Rachel’s blog posts covered an array of topics about her experiences with breast cancer and the curiosities of pink ribbon culture, she was particularly savvy in her descriptions of the pink-themed marketplace where strength, hope and courage come in the form of t-shirts, chocolates, figurines, and narratives of idealized survivorship. With snark-filled accuracy, Rachel catalogued how merchandisers blithely use the widespread desire for cure(s) to lull well meaning supporters into a state of consumptive bliss. Shopping for a cure never felt so good. If only “cure” were part of the transaction.

As a woman living with terminal cancer, Rachel knew that a “cure” for breast cancer was a figment of the collective imagination. Not only for her, but for all of those living with metastasis (when cancer spreads to distant organs of the body). Rachel had been diagnosed with breast cancer on three separate occasions. She had the typical array of treatments and brief periods of remission, but the third diagnosis changed  everything. There was no cure. There would be no cure. It was simply (and complicatedly) a matter of living with breast cancer until dying from breast cancer.

There are rare cases of people with metastasis who live twenty years, and no one knows which statistics will apply to them in the end. But the truth of the matter, which Rachel knew to her core, was that she would not survive this disease. What’s more, the treatments that were geared toward keeping her cancer at bay ended up damaging nerves, organs, and limbs until she had difficulty managing routine aspects of life. Walking, eating, cooking, typing, breathing. Activities many of us take for granted became everyday obstacles.

None of this stopped Rachel. She kept doing what she could. At the age of 41, she managed to retrofit her house to accommodate a limited range of motion and the inability to use her dominant arm. She cooked one-handed, henpecked her keyboard and, prepared for a day when she might be able to drive again, had hand controls installed in her vehicle. Rachel learned how to live life within the continually narrowing confines of patient-hood.

And it was patient-hood NOT survivorship that framed Rachel’s life. “I’m a cancer patient, Gayle. It’s what I do now. I spend hours in waiting rooms and chemo-chairs, hours on the phone to manage my health care, hours doing things that used to take me minutes. Being a cancer patient has become a job. It’s become my life. I don’t want it to be, but I don’t have a choice.”

During one of my visits with Rachel, I took her to a chemotherapy session. On the way home she directed me to a steep and narrow road that snaked in and around the Highlands of New Jersey. We ended up at a property nestled in the hills overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Rachel wanted me to see her “dream house.” There it was. She had grown up near the ocean in Perth, Australia. Sand and saltwater were in her blood. Rachel smiled when we drove up to the house. Then she told me the truth. This was a pretend dream house. “The devastation of cancer,” she said, “is that it not only takes your life, it steals your dreams.” Then in a matter-of-fact tone Rachel repeated the statement. “That’s what cancer does, Gayle, it steals your dreams.”

I went silent. A sense of dread was a dead weight around my heart. They were my dreams too. Not the house by the ocean. The dream of having Rachel in my life.

For Rachel and me, our time together had been a full but short 16 months. We didn’t find each other until October 2010 when she emailed me after reading my book, “Pink Ribbon Blues.” We became fast friends and collaborators. Rachel was a rabble-rouser, an activist — a soul sister who got what I was about. She believed as strongly as I did that pink hype was not the answer to the breast cancer problem. It was in fact getting in the way. Profit motives and branding priorities led to a distortion of medical information, the misallocation of funds, and an overall misrepresentation of the disease, especially for those who were dying from it. These truths, which rarely made the headlines, infuriated both of us. We were committed to change. This reality swirled around in my head in that brief moment of silence.

Then I asked Rachel, “What gets you through the day if you no longer have your dreams?” Without pause she said, “You.” “You do, Gayle. And my beloved…and Sarah… my cyber-sisters…Newman [Rachel’s dog]…and screaming about this pink hypocrisy. It’s going to change, Gayle. The walls are going to tumble down. It’s just a matter of time.”

I left New Jersey after a few days and returned to Texas. We continued our work via email, phone, Skype, and other social media. Ten weeks later Rachel was in the hospital. Cancer had made its way to her spine, and her brain. It was the same week Susan G. Komen for the Cure announced its now infamous decision to stop giving grants to Planned Parenthood. The same week I was in Florida for an academic conference. As I learned what was happening to Rachel, the Komen story began to unfold.

Komen’s deceptions, misrepresentations, abuses of the public trust, and failures of corporate governance surrounding the Planned Parenthood scandal opened a proverbial can of worms. New investigations surfaced about Komen’s revenues and budget allocations, branding initiatives, questionable corporate partnerships, legal actions against other smaller nonprofits, distortions of scientific data, and long-standing partisan bias. None of this was surprising to those of us who had been working to reveal Komen’s shenanigans long before the Planned Parenthood debacle stirred the public interest. But it was news to many others. Normally Rachel and I would have been sending rapid-fire messages about each new public reveal, in constant communication with the “cancer rebels” to spur social commentary. Not this time.

There was a startling silence as Rachel went in and out of consciousness, her voice missing from one of the most crucial and catalytic public debates to date about Komen’s role in the breast cancer industry. I sent her messages. Reported updates. Did Rachel know that Komen’s true colors were finally coming to light? That her personal efforts to reveal the truth about breast cancer were having an impact? Her beloved Anthony assured me that she did.

My partner in activism died on February 6^th, 2012. I hope that Rachel was right, that it’s only a matter of time until those pink walls come tumbling down. Maybe then, there will be a chance of getting closer to that elusive cure.

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*The 2012 edition includes a new Introduction about the Komen for the Cure/Planned Parenthood controversy and a color insert of images of, and reactions to, the pinking of breast cancer. For more information please visit Gayle Sulik’s website at gaylesulik.com and her blog at pinkribbonblues.org.

** Rachel Cheetham Moro’s blog, The Cancer Culture Chronicles, has been compiled and edited by her mother Mandy Cheetham and her friend Sarah Horton. The book contains all of Rachel’s blog posts in their entirety, with notes, resources and tributes. Available in October 2012, this is a 5×8 hardback book, 384 pages and available at cost from Blurb.com, price $30.95 (£21.50) plus shipping.

Today’s extra edition of the monthly “Bedside Manners” column features a follow-up post from one of our past guest authors: Chloe E. Bird is a senior sociologist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and co-author of Gender and Health: The Effects of Constrained Choices and Social Policies (Cambridge University Press).

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In light of the current debate over women’s reproductive rights and care, it is increasingly clear that the benefits of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) for access to comprehensive health care will not accrue equally to women across the country. Simply put: There is more agreement on what must be included in comprehensive health care for men than on whether and to what extent contraceptive and reproductive services must be included in comprehensive health care for women.

While it has long been recognized that comprehensive care for men includes sexual and reproductive health, the same has not been true for women. For example, women’s health insurance plans have typically allowed exclusions in this area even for pregnancy, and even when it is not a “preexisting condition”; indeed, there are no comparable accepted options for excluding entire aspects of health care for men while providing them for women.

Yet although the ACA assures women access to primary care and many reproductive services without copays, the debate over reproductive services continues. Recent political discussions on access have typically not included discussion of increases in women’s education, employment and career continuity attributable to contraception.

In the context of this debate, the Timely Access to Birth Control bill (AB 2348), which has been approved by the state legislature and is now awaiting Governor Brown’s signature, may appear to some to be a luxury that California can ill afford. But the reality is that over the mid to long run, AB 2348 would very likely save the state a significant amount of money. The bill allows registered nurses to dispense highly reliable hormonal contraceptives, including the pill. If enacted, doctors and nurse practitioners would be freed up to focus on more complex patient visits. If passed, the bill would increase women’s access to reliable contraceptives and reduce the costs of delivering that care.

In a Mother’s Day piece for Ms. Magazine Online, I pointed to the savings contraception generates for employers, insurers, and taxpayers. A public dollar invested in contraception saves roughly four dollars in Medicaid expenditures—or $5.1 billion in 2008—not to mention the broader health, social and economic benefits. Moreover, a 2010 study in California of a Medicaid family planning program found that every dollar spent saved the public sector over nine dollars (PDF) in averted costs for public health and welfare over five years. Rather than getting caught up in the national political debate over reproductive health coverage, California legislators should consider the significant cost savings as well as the social and economic benefits of improving timely access to reliable contraception.

On the national front, the goal of the ACA is to expand access to healthcare for Americans, especially those who currently lack health insurance; but the law also prioritizes improvements in the quality of care and reductions in costs. As we look for ways to provide efficient, high-quality, and cost-effective health care to more Americans, we can’t afford to ignore women’s health issues, including reproductive health care and the cost savings that contraceptive access provides.

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Cross-posted with the author’s permission from RAND’s blog

Two amazing young gender and sexualities scholars stepped up to offer a column this month on what I have dubbed “the real BDSM.” Heidi Rademacher and Suzan Walters are PhD students in sociology at Stony Brook University. Heidi has an MA from Brandeis in sociology and women & gender studies; Suzan has an MA from St. John’s University. They are working on a longer critique of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy that explores women’s experiences with BDSM, and offer this preview. Now to Heidi and Suzan on BDSM:

Are you, like many women, completely in awe of the incredibly sexy, powerful and accomplished Christian Grey?  Are you contemplating how to bring that orgasmic sex into your bedroom as illustrated throughout the bestselling trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey? If so, let us tell you what you really need to know before you strap up and get your whip on!

Fifty Shades of Grey has captured the imagination of women worldwide. The trilogy tells the “unconventional” love story between Christian Grey (closeted BDSM practitioner) and the young and innocent Anastasia Steele, who falls in love with him and his sexual prowess.

Within the first six weeks of sales in the US, over ten million copies were sold. As of September 2 , 2012, E. L. James’ controversial books are still holding strong at the top of the New York Times Best Seller list for fiction. The first two books of the trilogy (Fifty Shades of Grey and Fifty Shades Darker) have held the top two spots for 25 consecutive weeks. The third book, Fifty Shades Freed, has been ranked third for 24 weeks.

This trilogy brings this alternative sexual life style into public consciousness in perhaps a way no other mainstream book has. But, how well does it illustrate the real BDSM world? A few clarifications will help you decide.

The first thing you need to know is that unlike Grey’s practice, people involved in BDSM often form communities. In Staci Newmahr’s book Playing on the Edge we learn that these communities are generally local groups that are tied (no pun intended) to larger organizations located throughout the US and the world.

People gather in clubs or dungeons because these spaces provide the equipment that we read about in Grey’s playroom (the average non-billionaire BDSM practitioner cannot afford in-home playrooms). But also, such locations provide a space where people share experiences, form networks and take on roles.

Some members of the community serve as educators and provide workshops to teach others how to perform sexual acts and how to be a member of the community. They eat meals together, talk online, have private and public gatherings, etc. What is important to know is that BDSM rarely happens in isolation. As you may gather from this short explanation, communities serve a much larger purpose than just providing playrooms.

Second, the unequal power relations between BDSM partners are generally confined to a scene. A scene is an individual BDSM act. This might be surprising if your only exposure to BDSM is through this trilogy. When Grey (the dominant) proposes the BDSM contract to Ana (the submissive) we read that she is supposed to obey him always and in everything because she is to be his property. She must have at least seven hours of sleep each night, wear certain attire, always be clean shaven and/or waxed, go to beauty salons chosen by Grey. She is not allowed to masturbate unless permitted by Grey. She has to eat a diet that he has constructed, be on a strict exercise regimen, and never look Grey in the eyes unless it is at his request.

This is not common practice in the BDSM community. Instead, according to research conducted by Dr. Charles Moser at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, there is a very small population of BDSM participants who engage in what is called 24/7 relationships and Total Power Exchanges (TPE)—the arrangement Grey initially proposes to Ana in the  Fifty Shades series. In a 24/7 relationship the dominant and submissive both consent to maintain their roles in all aspects of their everyday activities, both sexual and non-sexual. In these relationships there is a TPE, which provides the dominant with complete authority over the submissive’s actions, behaviors and decisions. While 24/7 relationships and TPE are part of the BDSM spectrum, they represent a very small number of practitioners and are even somewhat stigmatized and taboo within the larger BDSM community.

We suspect that TPE and 24/7 relationships are not all they are hyped up to be. In fact, we think ways in which BDSM is portrayed in the Fifty Shades trilogy is suspect. In a recent NY Post article we learn of a real life banker who leads the double life that Grey does. But this story does not end with love, marriage and a baby carriage like the trilogy. Instead, it ends in a heart-shattering break up and violence.

Thus, what we read in Fifty Shades of Grey is even more fictional than we might have originally thought. For now, we’ve given you some of what we’d like you to know about BDSM. What we want to know is why is the low-base rate TPE so popular–in fiction?

–Heidi Rademacher and Suzan Walters

Recent events inspired this guest post authored by sociologist Michael Kimmel, author of Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, The Guy’s Guide to Feminism, and Manhood in America. Kimmel teaches sociology at SUNY Stony Brook and is one of the most influential researchers and writers on topics of men and masculinities . Reprinted with Kimmel’s permission from today’s Huffington Post, the author calls out not only Todd Akin but also Daniel Tosh for their recent misogynistic actions, as well as offers readers a larger critique of how rape is discussed in our culture.

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You have to pinch yourself sometimes to remind yourself that it’s 2012 and we still don’t know how to talk about rape in this country. Who would have thought that after half a century of feminist activism — and millennia of trying to understand the horrifying personal trauma of rape — we’d be discussing it as if we hadn’t a clue.

Okay, that’s a not quite true. When I say “we” — as in “we haven’t a clue” — that’s a little vague. So let me clarify. When I say “we,” I mean the half of the population to which I happen to belong. My gender. Men. Just consider the gender of each of these recent examples:

• In recent days, we’ve had a U.S. Congressman candidate draw distinctions that are so mind-numbingly wrongheaded and so politically reprehensible that even his own party is calling for him to drop out of his U.S. Senate race (where he is leading);

• In recent weeks, we’ve had one of the more curious debates about whether rape jokes can be funny;

• And over the past couple of years, the word “rape” has entered our vocabulary as a metaphor.

Each one reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about the singular horror of rape.

Todd Akin and “legitimate rape”

In trying to explain his opposition to abortion — even in cases of rape — Rep. Todd Akin observed that victims of “legitimate rape” cannot get pregnant because their bodies will shut down and prevent the sperm from fertilizing her egg. That is, he seems to believe that women’s bodies have a kind of magical, or God-given, ability to distinguish lovers’ sperm from rapists’ sperm, and to “know” which ones should be allowed to fertilize the egg.

Of course, this reveals a spectacular ignorance of women’s bodies — but what else did you expect from a right-wing anti-woman legislator? (The fertility rate for rape victims is exactly the same 5 percent that it is for women who have consensual sex.) But what is so offensive is less what he says about women’s bodies, and more what it implies about rape in the first place. By drawing attention to “legitimate” rape, Akin implies that “other” rapes are not legitimate — i.e., not rapes at all. Legitimate rapes are the equivalent of what others call “real” rape — a stranger, using force, preferably with a weapon, surprises the victim. All “other” rapes — like date rape, marital rape, acquaintance rape, child rape, systematic rape by soldiers, rape as a form of ethnic cleansing (where the actual purpose is to impregnate) — aren’t really rapes at all. This would exclude, what, about 95 percent of all rapes worldwide?

By linking the criteria for labeling some assault as rape to the possibility of pregnancy, Akin in effect blames impregnated women’s bodies for failing to slam that cervix door shut on those illegitimate sperm. Their bodies having failed them, why, then, he asks, should the state sanction a “murder” (abortion) that their own bodies didn’t sanction? This isn’t just lunacy on the scale ofMonty Python’s famous inquiry into the identity of witches, it’s a consistent ideological position against women’s conscious and deliberate ability to make conscious decisions about her body. The body speaks; women’s voices are silenced.

Rape as Humor

Last month, the comedian Daniel Tosh attempted to silence a heckler at the Laugh Factory, saying, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now? Like right now?” This has been a standard theme at comedy clubs for a while now. Hordes of fellow comedians jumped in to defend Tosh. Comedy, they argued, is designed to push the envelope, to make really tragic and horrible things funny.

Such claims are, of course, disingenuous. Have you heard the German comedian’s “Two Jews walk into a bar” joke? Neither have I. How about the racist comedian joke about lynching? Only on White Supremacist websites (and never in a public club). The question isn’t whether or not rape jokes “push the envelope.” It’s which envelope it’s pushing, and in which direction.

Humor has often been a weapon of the weak, a way for those who are marginalized to get even with those who are in power. This is the standard explanation for the large number of Jewish and black comedians. And their takedowns of the rich, white, Christian are seen as evening the score: “they” get all the power and wealth, and we get to make fun of them.

But when the powerful make fun of the less powerful, the tables are not turned; inequality is magnified. While it’s still not acceptable for white comedians to use racist humor (and when they do, they are instantly sanctioned, as was Michael Richards), but it’s suddenly open season on women and gay people. Ask Tracy Morgan.

In a sense, though, Tosh’s casual misogyny offered a rare glimpse inside the male-supremacist mind. Tosh doesn’t defend rape as just a “date gone wrong” or a “girl who changed her mind afterwards,” equally vile and pernicious framings. No, he is clear: rape is punishment. Punishment for what? For heckling him. That is: for having a voice.

Rape as Metaphor

Recently, my adolescent son told me he’s started hearing the word “rape: as a synonym for defeating your opponent badly in sports, or besting them in a rap competition. As in, “The Yankees raped the Red Sox” or, “Dude, that guy totally raped you” in the high school debate.

Using rape as a metaphor dilutes its power, distracts us from the specificity of the actual act. You got raped? Me too! I totally got raped in that math quiz.

In an interview some years ago, Elie Wiesel cringed at the use of the word “Holocaust” as a metaphor for hatred, or for murder in general. This was not hatred, not just murder, Wiesel argues.

“Hate means a pogrom, it’s an explosion, but during the War it was scientific, it was a kind of industry. They had industries and all they produced was death. Had there been hate, the laboratories would have exploded.”

Wiesel made clear that it’s not a metaphor: it is in its specificity that its power resides.

Rape is not a verbal put-down; it’s a corporeal invasion. It’s not an athletic defeat; it’s the violation of a body’s integrity, the death of a self. All equivalences are false equivalences.

It’s not a metaphor, it’s not a joke, and it’s not to be parsed as legitimate. It’s an individual act of violence. To believe that you can change the meaning of a word by turning it into a metaphor or a joke is the essence of male entitlement. It is an act of silencing, both the individual and all women. The arrogance of turning it into a metaphor, making it a joke — this is how that silencing happens.

And the good news — if any is to be taken here — is, of course, that it hasn’t worked. Women have responded, noisily and angrily, to these efforts at silencing.

Maybe “we” ought to shut up and just listen?

It is my pleasure to introduce Solange M. Lopes, who contacted me last month about contributing a post. Here it is! Solange is a 33-year old native of Senegal, West Africa, wife and mother of two residing in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. A writer at heart, her writing experience includes creating and editing the “Kawraal” student magazine at Suffolk University Dakar Campus and serving as student journalist for the Suffolk Journal in Boston from 2001 through 2004. She is the chief editor of her own blog at keurawa.com and is currently working on a collection of short stories.

A Lighter Shade of Woman

“Pretty for a dark-skinned girl”: since I was a little girl in pigtails, this has single-handedly been the one so-called compliment that’s always left me puzzled as to whether I should be flattered or offended by it. Or maybe a bit of both?

According to statistics by the World Health Organization for 2012, 77% of men and women in Nigeria alone regularly give in to the widely popular practice of skin bleaching. The report also cites other African nations such as Togo with 59 per cent of skin bleaching product users; South Africa, 35 per cent; and Mali, 25 per cent.

These statistics are not only proprietary to Africa. Per an article published by BBC News Africa in June 2012, “for centuries Indian women have been raised to believe that fairness is beauty, and this has given rise to a vast and ever-growing skin-whitening industry – which is now encouraging women to bleach far beyond their hands and face.” The phenomenon extends to Cubans, black Americans, Jamaicans, Japanese and Arabic women as well, largely in cultures which appear to vastly favor fairer skin tones.

Some of the worst components of skin lightening creams include, but are not limited to, topical steroids, hydroquinone and derivatives of mercury. As stated in the World Health Organization June 2012 Information Sheet, “many skin lightening creams and soaps contain some form of mercury as an active agent. But mercury is dangerous. It can cause kidney damage and may also cause skin rashes, skin discoloration and scarring, as well as a reduction in the skin’s resistance to bacterial and fungal infections.”  Unfortunately, the incidence of skin cancer, neuropathy, skin atrophy and pigment disorders, as well as neurotoxic problems, to cite a few, has not halted the devastating progress of this lethal practice.

All in all, skin bleaching, or “skin lightening” as it is often mildly put, represents a serious disease affecting not only the body at large, but also detrimentally endangering the mental health and social well-being of its advocates.

As numerous and alarming the consequences of skin bleaching, even more varied and dire are their root causes. So many reasons have been cited to attempt to explain, or maybe justify this practice, from the disastrous post-slavery and colonial effects, to the argument around debasingly low levels of self-esteem in women using lightening products, to the now most prevalent phenomenon of socio-economic and media pressure.

However, after so many centuries of theorizing the why’s and how’s of this phenomemon, it has become obvious that the conversation needs to be modified, if not redirected in an entirely new direction altogether. Dwelling on obscure questions and tentative answers to explain the occurrence of this rampant social plague only perpetuates the problem by pitting real or imagined offenders, be it slavery, society or the media, against enabled victims who have no intention of curbing their destructive habit. The conversation, therefore, needs to focus around working to proactively put a stop to this calamity through education, self-empowerment, and self-acceptance.

The truth is, directly or indirectly, closely or remotely, we as human beings and especially as global women and creatures of change and advancement, are victims. Victims of the lack of education around the practice itself. Victims of disempowered societies in which the woman’s appearance is viewed as her main means of survival through fruitful marriage contracts and unions of monetary convenience. Victims of deconstructed families in which mothers teach little girls and boys to erase the original versions of themselves from the blackboard of Experience, just as they would unfinished infantile drawings. Victims of the loss of our women, our authentic, strong, beautiful women, the ones to lift up our men, carry and bring up our children, feed our families, plant trees and open new paths.

Victims because we fail to see and call attention to what’s inside, so we can go on and teach other women to see and call attention to what’s inside. Victims because so many times, we remain silent instead of speaking up, because just ignoring the issue is an issue in itself.

– Solange M. Lopes

The end of the baby boom years is identified variously as 1960 all the way to 1964. This means that while the lead-end of baby boomers are hitting 65 around now, at the tail, where I am, I’m flooded with fiftieth birthday events. Aging, anyone?

So I talked a little bit with Ashton Applewhite about aging. Ashton, who just turned 60, has been working on aging and ageism for over 5 years. She blogs about her research at stayingvertical.com, and her newest online project is yoisthisageist.com. Read it! It’s funny and informative.

NW: Yo is this ageist? seems to aim at what people expect from older people, whom you call “olders.” What do people want from olders, anyway?

AA: People want olders to quit fumbling for their change at the supermarket and holding up the line. The trick is to become what I call an “old person in training” – to acknowledge that if you’re lucky that person in line will be you some day. It makes room for empathy, which changes everything. And it enables us to envision and work towards the kind of late life we want.

NW: The top entry yesterday on Yo This is Ageist was a joke: Four yentas go to lunch at the Fountainebleu and the waiter says, “Welcome ladies! Is anything alright?” You confirm on your blog that, yes, this is ageist and anti-semitic. Also sexist, right? Seems like age and gender are two sneaky sources of inequality: what’s your favorite sneaky source of ageism?

AA: Our own prejudices, the ageist values that we internalize without even realizing it. Today a question came in from a reader who’s the same age her mother was when she was born, “but when I talk about having kids, she seems to freak out. She seems to be clinging on to the idea of being young by avoiding impending grandmother-hood, senior discounts, etc.”

I’m lucky enough to have two grandchildren, and they’re a source of extraordinary joy. Yet this woman’s internalized ageism is so powerful that she’s stiff-arming the prospect and alienating her daughter lest it make her “seem old.” When we talk about women “having it all,” we mean having to choose between raising kids and building a career. How about extending the argument and the time frame, so that older women don’t have to choose between being hot and being grandmothers?

NW: It seems pretty clear men get judged as they age differently from how women get judged as they age; both groups are subject to bias, but about different things. So what would be a sign of reducing the gender bias in aging bias, if you know what I mean?

AA: Many older women living alone end up in poverty for the first time in their lives. In retirement, forty percent have to make ends meet on Social Security alone. How about closing the wage gap and reforming Social Security so that it’s not geared towards married, single-earner families and women aren’t penalized for their years out of the workforce caring for others?

NW: Oh gosh, make the younger world less sexist and heteronormative and that will translate up the age scale. Nice work, no?

AA: I’d like that. One thing that’s struck me is that despite the fact that gender is overwhelmingly binary (almost everyone identifies as male or female), the concept of gender as a spectrum has gained widespread acceptance. If gender can be conceived of fluidly, why not age? It’s obviously a spectrum: we’re all younger than some people and older than others. Yet we unthinkingly accept a young/old binary — or more accurately a young/no-longer-young binary — that frames two thirds of our lives as decline. That’s grotesque. We made enormous progress against sexism and racism and homophobia in the 20^th century, and I’d like to see the same kind of consciousness-raising and mobilization against ageism now.

NW: What are some of your favorite examples of successful aging for women?

AA: All aging is successful, because otherwise you’re dead: living means aging. There’s no “best” or “right” way to age; each of us will make different accommodations and find different meanings. It’s great to hear about nonagenarians skydiving or Betty White, but it would be nuts to measure ourselves against these outliers. I think women have an intrinsic advantage when it comes to aging because most of us have had to adapt to circumstances – motherhood, a partner’s career changes, discriminatory workplaces, menopause – and getting older just puts another set of curves in the road.

ps. For fun, read Virginia’s question at yoisthisagist and Ashton’s answer. “But you don’t look…[your awkwardly high age]….”

-Virginia Rutter

I’m happy to bring you this guest post co-authored by two researchers at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation: Chloe E. Bird, senior sociologist and co-author of Gender and Health: The Effects of Constrained Choices and Social Policies (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Tamara Dubowitz, policy researcher. In this post they discuss recent studies which examine the impact of neighborhood environments on health and health disparities.

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If you had good options about what to eat but made bad choices and became obese, then the fault would be yours. But, what happens when you don’t have good options?

That’s the problem in America today – being overweight is not all your fault. You don’t make the decisions to put transfats, high-fructose corn syrup and excess salt in your food, or unhealthy snacks in the vending machine at work. You don’t dictate that the equivalent of 54 sugar cubes get put into an extra-large soda. These are so-called constrained choices – ones you don’t get to make. Yet, you live with the consequences.

We believe it is time to consider who determines the options for us and what can be done to put better ones on the table. We can’t all afford to buy only organic foods or even have access to them. And, we probably don’t make it a pastime to follow the latest research on nutrition. But, we can take a moment to think before we order a second soda.

And, we can choose to call on those who determine the options to shoulder part of the responsibility for America’s obesity epidemic and to stop the name-calling – like labeling medical researchers “food nannies” when they ask restaurants to deliver sensible portions, priced right. We need to hold vending-machine companies and their managers to account if they stock only junk food in those little compartments.

Consider a few statistics. The latest figures indicate that two of three adults and one of three children and adolescents in the United States are overweight or obese. The impending health and economic consequences are staggering. According to the Institute of Medicine, the medical costs alone of obesity-related diseases and disabilities exceed $190 billion a year. These costs comprise more than 20 percent of national health care spending. The number keeps rising. Want your health care costs to spike further? Then, keep eating the constrained choices that are not healthy.

RAND research, using data from the Women’s Health Initiative study, found that living where there is a higher density of fast food outlets is associated with higher blood pressure and risk of obesity; while, a greater density of grocery stores is associated with lower blood pressure and lower risk of obesity. These relationships hold even after taking into account women’s characteristics and socioeconomic status of their residential neighborhoods.  In other words, where you live can affect your weight and your health.

Moreover, another recent RAND study found that 96% of main entrées at all restaurants studied—including delivery, family style, upscale, fast food, buffet, and fast casual—exceed the daily limits for calories, fat, saturated fat, and sodium recommended by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Policy approaches to reduce obesity are not magic bullets. If we want to reverse the obesity epidemic, then we need environments which assure that we have good food options and the opportunity to choose them.

We will be more successful at stemming the growing tide of obesity and improving our own health if everyone accepts their share of responsibility for the obesity epidemic. We need to ask our favorite restaurants, the food vendors near where we work, even grocery stores to give us better options. We can always ignore them, if we wish, but then that’s our choice. Right now, too many bad choices are being made for us.

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Cross-posted on RAND’s blog

I’ve been thinking about Mona Simpson’s beautifully written essay and Michele Asselin’s exquisite photographs since they appeared in The New York Times Magazine last weekend. Asselin’s portrait series, accompanied by interviews, is called “Full Time Preferred: Portraits of Love, Work and Dependence.” Her photographs feature nannies with their charges—their employers’ children—in intimate moments of caregiving. The women and children are beautiful and content, bathed in radiant luminescence and surrounded by darkness. Most of the children are babies or toddlers, ages when showering them with love comes easily, more often than not.

Simpson writes with nuance and honesty about the complexities of relationships based on paid caregiving. She accurately describes Asselin’s photographs as

…moments of private contentment, with the serenity and depth borrowed from the portraiture legacy of the Madonna and child…

By placing nannies in this visual legacy, the photographs deliberately elevate caregivers who aren’t valued in our society. Asselin’s impulse is to make paid caregivers visible, to bring them out of the shadows and into the center. In her essay, Simpson observes that nannies have confided to her that their employers “crop them out of photographs of their children.” These portraits, the interviews with them, and Simpson’s essay all work against a society that still prefers to keep caregiving and domestic work invisible.

The online slideshow allows viewers to play a series of recorded interviews with nannies and their employers. I prefer this to the excerpts in the magazine because more individuality and complexity emerge among and between the different women. For the same reason, I’d love to see more photographs from Asselin—ones that leave behind the vein of Madonna-and-child. I’ve love to see photographs that not only lift paid caregivers out of their private, “unseen” world but also allow a fuller register of lived experience to emerge. With these children, yes, but also with their own children. Their own friends, partners, parents, relatives. And in all the public places we see paid caregivers, with others or by themselves: at the playground. At the store. At school. At the bank. At the airport. At the mall. And at daycare. (Because most children aren’t cared for by nannies or au pairs, and most paid caregivers don’t work in private homes.)

Just as biological and adoptive mothers have worked hard to break out of the impossible expectations placed on them by the ideologies of motherhood associated with the Madonna—everlasting patience, self-sacrifice, martyrdom, perfection—these “other mothers” deserve to be seen as being fully human, too.

I’d also love to see some portraits of male caregivers. There used to be a male au pair in my neighborhood. This was unusual, so all the kids at the playground knew him. But they’re out there. Just like fathers.

At its core, caring for others is not exclusively women’s work. It’s at the core of what it means to be human.

Visual imagery can’t convey the truly invisible structures of global inequality, sexism, and racism that underlie these relationships. But they can expand how we see the world—and how we imagine what’s possible. For this reason, I’d love for Asselin to continue to create images that ask us to re-imagine family in the broadest and most expansive ways.

Introducing our newest blogger: Susan McGee Bailey, Ph.D. Susan served as Executive Director of the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) and as a Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and Education at Wellesley College for 25 years. Welcome, Susan! -Girl w/Penners

“House Passes Gutted Version of  Violence Against Women Act”: the headline hits me like one more punch in an already bloody nose. But I am a 40 year veteran of the gender wars. For 25 of those years I directed the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW), one of the nation’s largest and most influential gender focused research and action organizations. Despite the disheartening direction of current policy debates and the frequency of misogynist remarks, I have learned not to succumb to the paralysis of discouragement.

In the 1960s “careers” for young college women were in the “‘type, teach or ‘care for’” range.  Without a degree the options were even more restricted. Every summer I earned money for college by working as a waitress. I learned about things we had no name for then:

Dottie arriving in dark glasses that she kept on all day, “They cover the bruises, honey. It’s hard for Jack to be home with the kids. He gets upset with me.”  Linda, a single mom, calling in sick; we all knew it met she had no one to stay with baby Sammy. Both women were supporting their families.

In those days women’s employment options were limited, not by the economy, but by society.  Some of us insisted on a different path. We forced major changes. Female construction workers, TV newscasters, and corporate managers were a rarity five decades ago. Today’s graduates confront a dismal economy, but can take for granted a wide range of career choices.

In fact, choice is assumed not simply in employment and the ability to seek legal protection from gender violence, but in our right to control our own sexuality and reproductive health. At a time when birth control pills were newly invented, domestic violence invisible and abortion a crime, women lacked  control over our bodies in ways sometimes hard for today’s young women and men to grasp.

Suddenly this spring ignorant anti-woman statements, strident voices and proposals on contraception and reproductive health that would turn the clock back a half century again surround us. Some protest that talk of an anti-woman agenda is being promoted simply as a distraction from ‘truly important’ policy issues. Nothing reminds me more of the 1960s than this classic dismissal of women and our concerns.

But there is also widespread outrage, and nuanced rebuttal. The reality that women are individuals who make a range of different choices for themselves is widely proclaimed by tweeters and  bloggers from both left and right.

Ten years ago such analyses came almost exclusively from feminists struggling to be heard.

Not that the ‘war’ over. Each day brings new and outrageous policy proposes that threaten the well being of women and children.  Still, awareness has grown. There is a good chance that key issues related to women’s health, sexuality and employment will remain on the public agenda throughout the election cycle. This is positive. Keeping these concerns in the forefront of public debate where the absurdities can be exposed and countered, is the upside of the demeaning negativity. There is no time for anything but hope and the energy it provides.