We had different plans for this month’s blog, but it has become impossible not to comment on what transpired on the night before the Grammy’s.

Tonni: Thanks to the wonder of technology I was receiving live Grammy commentary via a three-way conversation with friends in the States when my girlfriend mentioned that Chris Brown was missing. Apparently so was ‘our girl’ Rihanna- ‘our girl’ ‘cause she’s a fellow ‘Caribeana’ and regardless of her vocal abilities we’re proud and protective. There are many problems with what happened next but what I find repulsive is how the gory details are unfolding in the media. Unlike Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory, try as I might I couldn’t escape TMZ’s trademarked photo. It was everywhere, displaying a young woman battered, bruised, and completely and totally vulnerable.

Gwen: As a survivor of violence myself, it will not come as a shock that, like Tonni, I was saddened, outraged and generally overwhelmed by the coverage of Rihanna’s struggle with domestic violence. We felt that highlighting Rihanna’s ordeal could help us capture the fact that domestic violence is directly related to the systematic oppression of women around the world, regardless of race, class, ethnicity and fame. In short, domestic violence can happen to anyone, including celebrities. Further, the coverage of domestic violence in popular media outlets shows the shortcomings of current methods in dealing with the structural nature of violence against women.

The Big Picture
According to Amnesty International’s Stop Violence Against Women program, without exception, a woman’s greatest risk of violence is from someone she knows. Amnesty International classifies domestic violence as a human rights abuse, rightly arguing that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms the inadmissibility of discrimination and proclaims that everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in the declaration, without distinction of any kind, including distinction based on sex. When women are subjected to domestic violence and the State does not protect them against this violence, whether due to inefficient or ineffective laws and policies, then the State should be held responsible for the abuse.

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Courtesy of my favorite economist, Heather Boushey, at the Center for American Progress:

In answer to the question “what about women? aren’t they losing jobs too?”, here are some December 2008 stats for a reality check:

Construction has lost 22.5 of all the jobs; manufacturing has lost 28.8% (add that together and that’s 50% of the jobs lost.)  These are both male-dominated fields.

Within manufacturing, over 2/3 of the jobs have been lost by men. In manufacturing, at the start of the recession, women were 28.8% of all manufacturing workers.  They’ve since lost 32.9% of the jobs.

Within construction, over 90% of the jobs have been lost by men.

Within the finance and insurance industries, where women actually made up almost 2/3 of the workers, women have lost 1/2 of all the jobs.

But let’s keep this in perspective: The financial industry overall has only lost 8% of the total jobs that have been lost.

Finance jobs lost are nearly 230,000 jobs out of a total of 3 million jobs lost, as of December 2008.

In real estate – the other subcategory in the financial field – women have lost over 100% of jobs, even though they made up about 1/2 of the real estate workers at the beginning of the recession.

All this underscores how important it is to look at industry-specific contexts when talking about gender and jobs.  On net, the men are losing.  Jobs, that is.

Just had to post the amazing, emotional speech Dustin Lance Black gave at the Oscars. Black won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Milk (go see it if you haven’t!). After this, it was pretty much downhill for the Oscars:

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama said, “We will restore science to its rightful place.” Yet just a few weeks later the Stimulus Package was stripped of provisions to expand affordable family planning, “a betrayal of millions of low-income women” as Planned Parenthood termed it. Republicans successfully jettisoned the provisions on the claim that family planning would do little to stimulate the economy, though they provided no statistical or economical rationale for this, proving only that prejudice and the culture wars still take precedent over the evidence of statistical science.

Just a few weeks later and now a detailed study from the Guttmacher Institute is out clearly showing the economic and social benefits of family planning:

Publicly funded family planning prevents nearly 2 million unintended pregnancies and more than 800,000 abortions in the United States each year, saving billions of dollars, according to new research intended to counter conservative objections to expanding the program

…

Report co-author Rachel Benson Gold called the family planning program “smart government at its best,” asserting that every dollar spent on it saves taxpayers $4 in costs associated with unintended births to mothers eligible for Medicaid-funded natal care.

For a Republican block that is so focused on saving Americans their tax dollars, family planning seems to cohere extremely well with their notions of economic stimulus after all. Let’s hope that the Democrats don’t bow out so easily on their next fight: they claim that they will soon work toward a large increase in funding for Title X, the main federal family planning program.

Let’s also hope that such two-faced rhetoric as that of Troy Newman of Operation Rescue, who termed the attempt to include family planning in the stimulus package a “shameful population control program that targeted low-income families,” disappears from the debate. Providing access to family planning and contraception does not add up to coercion. Taking away this access for those who cannot otherwise afford it does.

Courtesy of Feminist Review, I am excited to be able to continue the conversation on GWP about the relationship between feminism and religion. Last week, Allison McCarthy brought us an interview with Leora Tanenbaum, author of Taking Back God: American Women Rising Up for Religious Equality. Today Renee Leonowicz reviews Mary Henold’s Catholic and Feminist (UNC Press) and the rise of a feminist movement that originated within the Catholicism it hopes to change. –Kristen

It may be customary for some to place Catholic and feminist identities in opposition to each other, but Mary Henold’s illuminating and meticulous examination of the Catholic feminist movement unearths a critical link between feminist consciousness and activism, and Catholic tradition and conviction. Her comprehensive research illuminates an exhaustive timeline of the Catholic feminist movement that incorporates information gathered from texts and periodicals, a number of self-conducted interviews, and archival documents.

Henold traces the beginning of the feminist movement within the Catholic community to around the same time of the emergence of the larger women’s movement in the United States. She asserts, however, that religious women’s embrace of feminism was not applied to their faith as a mere reaction to the political climate at large. Henold argues that their feminism was actually propagated by their faith, and explores the inherently radical nature of Christianity through the actions of practicing feminist Catholics who declare social justice as a principle of their faith.

The American Catholic community underwent a radical reconstruction in the 1960s that brought blossoms of feminist consciousness into the church. This change led to a struggle to assert women’s autonomy and integrate progressive ambitions within the staunch conventionalism of the church’s hierarchy, and resulted in confusion, doubt, and subdued optimism in the 1970s. A fissure formed between women who were disenchanted with, and repudiating, the church, and those still hopeful for improvement. Henold chronicles the beginning of those divergent paths, which continue today.

In Catholic and Feminist, readers are introduced to the encapsulating sisterhood of religious women, theological scholars, and laywomen born of the prestigious and virile hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Whether ruminating on the sexist implications of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, demanding ordination through grassroots organizing, or marching against injustices alongside nonreligious activists, Catholic feminists have incorporated their zeal for revolutionary equality with their faith to challenge sexism and other forms of oppression within the church and society at large.

Review by Renee Leonowicz

Cross-posted from Feminist Review

Did you hear the one about how testosterone is to blame for the meltdown? Pretty good stuff, eh? The headline reads: “Male Hysteria and the Market Meltdown: Is testosterone to blame for the financial crisis? A growing body of evidence suggests an intriguing answer as neuroscience reshapes our understanding of economics.” IMHO, it is perhaps one of the most absurd of the reflections on what the economic meltdown tells us about men and masculinity today.

Wondering if there might not be a “third-wave feminist masculinity scholar” on the project, I talked to my Framingham State College colleague, Professor Ben Alberti. Ben is an anthropologist who usually studies gender in ancient cultures (he says “prehistoric guylands”). Here’s what he had to say:

BA: How the hell can testosterone cause a market meltdown? Saying it is about testosterone covers up the idea of calculated greed. There is a much larger system than the trading room dynamics that accounts for how our economy works—or fails. It is misdirection, like a magic trick.

GWP: But even if we can mock biological explanations, isn’t that calculated greed part of the culture that men live in, a part of the expectations for being a “good man”?

BA: Oh, rubbish. You are simply saying that if men aren’t a “victim of their biology” they are a “victim of their culture”—that’s the “crisis of masculinity” argument, and I don’t buy it.

GWP: There’s been some interesting reporting on how unemployment is stressful for men, but you’re saying that we can biologize masculinity—but we can also culturize it—and get to the same place?

BA: Yes. Men can be victims—and there are a lot of men suffering right now in this economic downturn–but not because of their being men. It isn’t about identity or role any more than it is about testosterone. This crisis is about economics, values, inequality.

GWP: But men are living in a world of changing expectations, and it can be hard to respond because they aren’t (yet) fully equipped to switch gears, right?

BA: Oh come on!

GWP: What?

BA: In masculinity research there’s the notion of the “man box.” The man box view shows us the cultural expectations that men are subject to and that shape their actions. As you can imagine, a “box” suggests it is really hard to get out. I’m saying there’s no f-ing box. It is all about choices. Not the crisis, but the response. There are constraints, for sure. That means circumstances will determine which resources you can draw on for being what kind of man. But don’t masculinize constraints…. When we talk about men, we need to talk about possibilities rather than expectations. We need to talk about actions—what we’re performing—rather than containers—like the box.

GWP: (We’re not supposed to pun about the box, right?) You’ve talked about masculinity as performance—but what does that give us?

BA: Here’s a cliché example, one I’m familiar with: asking directions. So from the point of view of the “man box,” I don’t want to stop and ask for directions because I’m a man. What I’m saying is that, really, I don’t stop and ask directions because I haven’t done it before.

GWP: It sounds like you are saying that the issue of where men are today—in terms of unemployment or in terms of ethical choices in the pursuit of their work or career—is a lot more tractable and a lot simpler than we make it out to be when we expect biology or culture or the man box to leave men in “a crisis of masculinity.” Is that it?

BA: Yes. Stop anticipating a conflict. Don’t anticipate the man box. I am saying when you do it—ask directions, change your approach to work, deal with this awful economic crisis, whatever it is–it becomes part of your repertoire. That’s how change happens.

-Virginia Rutter

Yep, Michelle’s gonna be the cover of March 2009 Vogue!

For the latest from Michelle-Obama-watching Gina McCauley (creator of the Michelle Obama Watch blog), check out the latest at Broadsheet.

“It’s like a mass public vivisection where we project all of our hopes, dreams, fears, neuroses and psychoses on to one person,” says Gina.  Sooo familiar.  Um, Hillary Clinton, anyone?

And speaking of projections, definitely check out the spread on Sarah Palin in the latest issue of More.  More from me on that soon.

We’re extremely pleased to give you a guest post from Allison McCarthy, who is offering a unique addition to Girl with Pen with author discussions on recent books with a feminist twist. Allison is a freelance writer based in Maryland and a recent graduate of Goucher College. Her work has been published in The Baltimore Review, ColorsNW, Girlistic, JMWW, Scribble, Dark Sky, and The Write-Side Up. –Kristen

Leora Tanenbaum is a full-time writer and the author of classic contemporary feminist texts such as Slut! Growing Up Female With A Bad Reputation and Catfight: Rivalries Among Women–From Diets to Dating, From the Boardroom to the Delivery Room. She worked for ten years at the Jewish Education department of the National Headquarters of HADASSAH: The Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her new book, Taking Back God: American Women Rising Up for Religious Equality (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), explores the complex relationships between American women and faiths such as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including many historical texts and personal interviews, Tanenbaum analyzes the dynamics of religion and feminism with skillful insight and nuanced sensitivity. In a recent phone interview, Tanenbaum discussed her work with this groundbreaking new book:

1.) Although this book may seem like a departure from the themes of your previous two books, it still carries a strong current of secular feminism. Do you see this book as continuing the work of your previous books?

It does on the face seem to be very different, but everything I write is ultimately about the same concern: to improve the lives of girls and women. Obviously, if we improve the lives of girls and women, it will improve the lives of boys and men. [My books] share in common the ways females are socialized in our culture and certainly in our culture, religion is chock-full of socialization of females to behave in certain circumscribed ways.

2.) Have you always self-identified as an Orthodox Jewish feminist? Were there any conflicts in your life that fractured these two identities?

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A new Love in the Time of Layoff column of mine goes live over at Recessionwire.com today, and in the meantime, I wanted to share this post from another writer over there, Dan Colarusso, former managing editor of Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com until the end of 2008 and current managing editor of The Business Insider. Dan’s post is titled “Recession Recipes: Satisfaction Stew”. A taste:

You’ve been stripped of your big office, fat title, hot assistant and, most important, your paycheck. But being emasculated on the job doesn’t mean you can’t satisfy your significant other at home—with food.

On the Home Depot scale, cooking something impressive and tasty falls somewhere in between changing a light bulb and installing a new shower head—that is, pretty simple. Some quick rules for the new house husband, and a 20-minute recipe…

For the recipe, click here.

What Kind Of Economic Stimulus Do American Women Want? by Ruth Rosen
2/18/09
Talking Points Memo: Advocates for women workers have felt great anxiety about whether the Obama administration would make sure that women – along with men – would be included in the $787-billion stimulus package that on 17 February 2009 completed its passage through both houses of Congress.

Two Women Show Real Bipartisanship, by Madeline Kunin
2/17/09
Huffington Post: As the $789 economic stimulus plan is being signed today by President Barack Obama in Denver, two women deserve much of the credit. Without the leadership of Maine Senator Susan Collins and her colleague Senator Olympia Snowe, there would be no signing ceremony today.

(Thanks to the ladies at the WMC, as usual, for the heads up.)