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…

One of my favorite things about traveling with my intergenerational feminist panel is the slumber party. Courtney and I are here holed up in the hotel with chocolate chip cookies and Airborne and I’ve promised her I’d post this event. It looks SO FAB!

The American Hero and the American Dream:
Reflections on Our Contemporary Political Narratives

Date: Sunday, September 28
Time: 2-4 pm

Location: The Forum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum

In this interactive panel, academics, journalists, and comedians discuss the dominant narratives–perpetuated by both the campaigns and the media–during this unprecedented election. As they explore the ways in which these two presidential candidates and their VPs have been framed, they will also be examining the way the American public still thinks about race, class, and gender, and how this election has served to defibrillate so many beating, bleeding political hearts.

Moderator: Courtney E. Martin

Panelists:
Charlton McIlwain, Assistant Professor of Culture and Communication, NYU
Gloria, Feldt, author and blogger at Heartfeldt Politics
Ramin Hedayati, associate producer at The Daily Show

To make up for the quiet over here today, I bring you a late-night newsbreaking post from our very own Virginia Rutter. With all the chaos down on Wall Street these days, I’m finding it hard to maintain a sense of the larger larger picture. Virginia offers us that. Read it, and, well, weep. -GWP

How ya doin’?

by Virginia Rutter, PhD

Framingham State College

There’s an awesome new report out from John Schmitt and the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), called “The Reagan Question.” It starts like this:

In his closing remarks during the final presidential debate of 1980, Ronald Reagan famously asked the American people: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

The CEPR report reprises the question for us today. And, besides having higher blood pressure and a lot of irritatsia, CEPR tells us, on 23 out of 25 economic indicators, we are doing worse.

Among the indicators is employment for women—which is down. So is employment for men. But check this out:

Inflation rate—up from 3.3 to 5.4 percent.

Unemployment rate—up from 4.0 to 6.1 percent.

Uninsured—we got millions more now.

Poverty—we got millions more now.

Personal savings—that we’ve got a lot less of now.

Even the good news isn’t really good news: Family income is better now than before, by a whopping 262 dollars after 8 years. That’s not the irritating part. Here’s the irritating part. Under Bush, our productivity is the other indicator that is up. Our productivity grew by 22 percent in the past 8 years. In 2000, our productivity was up just 16%. That’s good! (Our “fundamentals”—the workers—per McCain.) So, we have become more productive! We’re doing great! But wait, where are the profits? Where are all the advantages? Not with us. Check out “real wage growth”: under real wage growth wages were up in 2000 8.2 percent. In 2008, wages were up 1.8 percent. Feh. Feh. Feh.

Do take a look at this report. It is carefully constructed (lots of great citations to the data at the end) and above any of the particulars, you get the point. How ya doin’? Not so great.

GWPenner Elline Lipkin is trying to collect girls’ responses, as well as responses from their mentors, for her forthcoming book with Seal Press on Girls Studies by October 15th. Please take the survey for girl mentors, pass it on, and pass the other survey links onto the girls in your life!”

Survey for Girls Mentors

Survey for Girls ages 6-10

Survey for Girls ages 11-18

Apologies for the lack of posting today! A GWP anomaly, and I missed you all!

I spent the day traveling to Washington DC, where my intergenerational feminist panel spoke tonight at George Washington University before the Women’s Leadership Program–and an amazing group of women those WLPers are. Pictures coming soon. Tomorrow, we’re keynoting at the Association for Women in Communications conference, and I’m excited to attend some of their sessions (and swim in the hotel pool) as well.

More from me tomorrow, I promise!

This just in, via The White House Project:

Just in time for the first presidential debate, The White House Project is thrilled to announce that President Barbie is back on shelves! Exclusively at Toys R Us, this is President Barbie’s third term in office since Mattel and The White House Project joined together in 2000 and 2004 to let both little girls and boys know that a woman can be President. As Marie Wilson says, “To make change, you’ve got to go where the people are. More and more girls think they’re going to grow up to be president and call a join session of Congress because their dolls can.” To give a child in your life their very own President Barbie, click here.

Have any of the mamas out there bought Prez Barbie for their girls? Would be curious to hear your thoughts!

(Tina Fey glasses sold separately.)

I recently received an advance copy of a new book by Alix Kates Shulman, To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), which is excerpted in Salon this week. Many of you will know Alix from her much earlier novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. Her latest–a gut-wrenchingly true-to-life memoir this time–is breathtaking in its poignance. That’s all I’ll say. You can read from it right here.

And from a book publicity perspective, I’m fascinated at the way savvy authors now are doing video trailers. Alix has a wonderful one–check it out, here. And to hear Alix on writing, check out this podcast. Kudos to the ex-prom queen on each and every front.