Read up, everybody. Here are a few links to interviews with, reviews of, and posts by Nadje al-Ali. She is the director of Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and author of What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq. In her new book, Dr. al-Ali shows “how the US invasion has set Iraqi women’s rights back as much as 70 years”–as explained in an excellent Guardian review by Sara Wajid.

In a 2007 interview with Mother Jones, al-Ali explains, “Women have been the biggest losers of the post-invasion period. I worked on the modern history of Iraqi women, and of course there were horrible problems related to living under a dictatorship, living with wars, living with sanctions. But one of the most tragic things is that really, women have been pushed back and have lost out quite a bit.” The interview gives details about shifts backwards in the post-invasion safety, cultural practices, and even the constitutional status of women.

At AlterNet in March 2008, Dr. al-Ali posted on The Iraq Legacy: Millions of Women’s Lives Destroyed, pointing out the political irony (to put it lightly) of this so-called liberation:

“On International Women’s Day in 2004, nearly a year after the invasion of Iraq, George Bush, the US President, addressed250 women from around the world who had gathered at the White House. ‘The advance of women’s rights and the advance of liberty are ultimately inseparable,’ he said.”

But she explains that this is “stirring stuff, but totally empty claims. In fact, Iraq’s women have become the biggest losers in the post-invasion disaster.”

–Virginia Rutter

Conference Details
Date: Monday, February 2, 2009
Time: 09:30 AM – 05:00 PM
Location: George Washington University
Betts Theater at the Marvin Center
800 21st Street, N.W Washington, DC 20052

Even if you can’t go, do check out the conference program. The lineup includes bloggers including GWP’s own Veronica Arreola (aka Viva la Feminsta) and my fellow Progressive Women’s Voices gals Joanne Bamberger (aka PunditMom), Latoya Peterson (aka Racialicious), Kristen Rowe-Finkbeiner (aka Moms Rising Executive Director), as well as Melissa Silverstein (Women and Hollywood blog), Tedra Osel (Bitch PhD), and BlogHer co-founder Elisa Camahort Page!

A final, pre-conference twittercast takes place this Sunday. The theme will be: “Fem2.0 Agenda: What do you think? What themes are missing? How can we improve next time?”

For conference registration, click here.

Just saw this over at Feministing and wanted to spread word:

On Monday, Yes Means Yes co-editors Jessica Valenti and Jaclyn Friedman will be livechatting on Feministing with contributors Miriam, Samhita and Cara from the Curvature and Feministe about the book.

The chat begins at 3 pm EST, here and, as all things Feministing, promises to be lively!

Buy the book, here.

And if a GWP reader would like to review it, please do email me, here: deborah (at) girlwpen (dot) com .

Well someone is paying attention at last. Judith Warner, who writes the Domestic Disturbances column for the New York Times, has a column today that delves into the question I asked two days ago: Why is NO ONE interested in the fact that studies have shown that teens as a group aren’t actually promiscuous?

Warner first describes how Linda Perlstein, the author of Not Much Just Chillin’: The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers, kept being called during the media frenzy over the “oral sex epidemics”:

“I’d say, ‘No one is doing that,’” she told me when I called her this week to refresh my memory of her story. “Even the sluttiest kids I knew, when I told them about that said, ‘Ewww. No one does that.’ This really prurient stuff was being way overblown.

“Believe me, I wanted to be on ‘Oprah.’ I had a book to sell. I’d say, ‘There’s lots of stuff to talk about. Stuff that really should be talked about, that’s more nuanced and complex.’ They were like ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’”

Warner has a theory well worth considering as to why society and parents insist on oversimplifying issues that relate to children’s loss of innocence:

All the examples of child myth-making that I’ve mentioned here have to do, at base, with the perceived corruption of childhood, the loss of some kind of “natural” innocence. When they depart from kernels of reality to rise to the level of myth, they are, I believe, largely projections that enable adults to evade things. Specifically, the overblown focus on messed-up kids affords parents the possibility of avoiding looking inward and taking responsibility for the highly complex problems of everyday life. [my emphasis]

In the case of the allegedly lascivious Lolitas, Kefalas sees this flight from reality very clearly: “People don’t want to hear about the economic context, the social context” to young teen sexual activity and teen pregnancy, she told me. “For a 14-year-old to be having sex it’s usually a symptom of a kid who’s really broken and really hurt. Those who are having sex without contraception are a distinct set: they’re poor, from single-parent households, doing poorly in school, have low self-esteem. Teen pregnancy is so high in America compared to other places not just because of access to contraception but because we have a lot of poverty. But Americans don’t want to see themselves as a poor society. They want to make a moral argument: if only teens had better values.” [my emphasis again]

It does seem rather fantastical to me that articles and authors group “teenagers” as a whole into one category, and then encourage parents to practice parenting based on a grossly oversimplified and sensationalized definition of what it is that teens do. It should be the responsibility of these authors and talk shows, particularly if they purport to care about teens’ lives and futures, to ignore the ratings and the talk show invites, to report fairly and with an eye to the specifics, both differences and overlaps, between groups of teens–and with an eye to root causes, far beyond and much more relative than “morality”, as to why some teens do engage in promiscuous behavior.

I teach a persuasive essay writing class to high school sophomores and every time a student hands in an essay draft, I inevitably hand it back with a big circle drawn around the intro: “You need to push this thesis–make it more complex, more sophisticated, more specific. Tell me how and why and in what way,” I write. We, as readers, as [future] parents, as once-teens-ourselves, have the responsibility to do the same for those who report on contemporary teenage behavior.

–Kristen Loveland

From The Independent: “The first government collapse of the global economic crisis is about to yield the world’s first openly-gay leader. Johanna Sigurdardottir, a former air hostess, is expected to be sworn in as Iceland’s Prime Minister by the end of the week.” Read all about it here.

Thank you, economic crisis!

–Virginia Rutter

Today, another bookish post from the awesome Allison McCarthy!  Enjoy.  -Deborah

My knowledge of Isadora Duncan was previously limited to what I had learned in college, which is to say that I recalled a few vague details delivered in a 200-level dance/theater course.  Although there were no assigned textbooks in that class, I probably would have loved a class discussion on Sabrina Jones’ new graphic novel, Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography. At the very least, I’d have paid more attention.

Jones covers both the major milestones and the smaller details of Duncan’s life, career and love affairs.  From an early age, Duncan explicitly rejected traditional forms of dance like ballet in search of a looser, more natural technique based on, of all things, her study of how the ocean crests and waves.  Known by admirers as “the barefoot dancer,” Duncan is famous for her groundbreaking performances and free-spirited approach to touring; she danced in Soviet Russia, as well as all over the U.S. and Europe, eventually founding multiple schools for young women to learn her methods.  Throughout the book’s 125 pages, Jones effectively captures Duncan’s fanciful dance movements with precise, dazzling black-and-white illustrations.

Although Duncan never explicitly identified as a feminist, it’s clear that Jones views her as one: in the typical shorthand style of graphic artists, she recounts Duncan’s financial savvy, high level of education and her independence of thought, including her forays with the male intellectual elites of her time (F. Scott Fitzgerald, François-Auguste-René Rodin, and Abraham Walkowitz are among the most distinguished in her circle of friends).  Her detractors labeled her as a “Bolshevik hussy,” yet Duncan never once censored her art, opting instead to find new venues and audiences who would embrace her challenging works.  Entangled in several passionate affairs, Duncan ignored the nay-saying of her family and actively pursued younger men, older men, and other heterosexual relationships that were often seen as controversial in the early twentieth century.  Equally unconcerned with her society’s imposed duality of being a dancer and mother, Duncan was both, even in the face of enormous tragedy that includes the death of her two children in a tragic accident and the stillbirth of her third child.

The reading level of the book says ages 9-12, so older readers may breeze through the bold illustrations more quickly than the intended audience will.  This may also explain the tepid nature of the novel’s love scenes.  Unlike 2007’s Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman by Sharon Rudahl, Jones includes no nudity or adult language, which leaves some scenes with a softened, YA-romance feel rather than a mature rendering of Duncan’s oft-discussed sexuality.  Overall, however, this book presents a fascinating account of Isadora Duncan’s life and earns a strong position in the growing canon of literary graphic novels.

–Allison McCarthy

Obama Signs Equal Pay Act. Some pictures speak louder than words, so I’ll just leave it at that.

(Do all women on the Hill wear red?!)

There’s been a huge spike in the number of SAHDs (stay-at-home-dads, for those not in the know). From 2003-2006, the number actually rose a full 62%–that’s really high! And this was before the current tsunami of layoffs. I’d be so curious to see what that number is now.

Jumping on the trend, yesterday The Today Show featured a segment called “The New Face of Mr. Mom.” Some good stuff, but my question is this: When will a SAHD become something other than a “Mr. Mom”? You can watch the video here and see what you think (and let me know!):

Just over a month ago, the New York Times featured a column by Charles Blow lamenting the state of young people dating (in case it’s not obvious, his main points: dating = desired; hooking up = “sad”). The column was filled with over-generalizations, most notably about “what girls want.” To see a more even-handed, inquisitive, if still problematic, article about our fairer sex’s needs, you should probably take a look at the New York Times Mag’s “What Do Women Want,” which includes such felicitous quotes as, “Meana made clear…that, when it comes to desire, ‘the variability within genders may be greater than the differences between genders,’ that lust is infinitely complex and idiosyncratic.” As a keen follower of many a cultural-sexual zeitgeist article, it was a refreshing moment.

Far away from the Op-Ed page in the NY Times’ Health section yesterday, there appeared yet another article that made me sniff the air and wonder, “Has change really come to America?” The article, titled “The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity” documented how, despite making guest appearances on Oprah as an “oral-sex epidemic” and on Tyra, the idea of millions of not-yet-legal Americans getting it wildly on, is, well, not totally the case. (For the record, the Guttmacher Institute rebutted the notion of a teen oral sex epidemic last year: their research showed that most teens who have had oral sex have also had intercourse, and only 1 in 4 virgin teenagers have had oral sex.)

Tyra’s shows, on a teen pregnancy epidemic and teenage unprotected sex, were at least more on topic, though like most TV hosts her unscientifically-surveyed data was thrown to the public replete with exclamation points and sad-face emoticons.

So what’s the real dish on teenage sex? The National Center for Health Statistics troublesomely reported this month that “births to 15- to 19-year-olds had risen for the first time in more than a decade.”

But does this necessarily mean a rise in teenage promiscuity? Of course not, as one perspicacious NY Times reporter, Tara Parker-Pope, demonstrates. Having done her research, Parker-Pope also reports that “Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991” and goes on to write:

The latest rise in teenage pregnancy rates is cause for concern. But it very likely reflects changing patterns in contraceptive use rather than a major change in sexual behavior. The reality is that the rate of teenage childbearing has fallen steeply since the late 1950s. The declines aren’t explained by the increasing availability of abortions: teenage abortion rates have also dropped.

And indeed, as the Guttmacher Institute has reported, there has been a shift in sex education: in 2002 the proportion of teens likely to hear information about contraception had declined from 1995, while the proportion who were likely to have heard only abstinence information had increased.

Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University and the author of “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus” (N.Y.U. Press, 2008), who was also cited in the Charles Blow column, though in a very different context, closes off the article by telling everyone to basically just chill the hell out:

“I give presentations nationwide where I’m showing people that the virginity rate in college is higher than you think and the number of partners is lower than you think and hooking up more often than not does not mean intercourse,” Dr. Bogle said. “But so many people think we’re morally in trouble, in a downward spiral and teens are out of control. It’s very difficult to convince people otherwise.”

Of course, reporting that we actually shouldn’t be worried about teenage sexuality isn’t sexy –it takes away our society’s opportunity to fetishize the idea of forbidden, rampant teen sex, our society’s leeway to take a morally outraged and overwrought approach to young people’s sex lives. So why should I be surprised that the article hasn’t gotten anywhere near the “Most Emailed List,” even in the Health section, and even though the Blow column spent a number of days in front-page, Number One spot? I guess I’m not. I just wish I could be.

-Kristen Loveland

Image Credit.

Why does the New York Times keep printing stories about gender relations in the wake of layoff that make me want to throw up?

The latest (thank you, Shira!): “It’s the Economy, Girlfriend.” Some snippets, so that you can consider barfing, between the tears, too:

Once it was seen as a blessing in certain circles to have a wealthy, powerful partner who would leave you alone with the credit card while he was busy brokering deals. Now, many Wall Street wives, girlfriends and, increasingly, exes, are living the curse of cutbacks in nanny hours and reservations at Masa or Megu. And that credit card? Canceled.

Raoul Felder, the Manhattan divorce lawyer, said that cases involving financiers always stack up as the economy starts to slip, because layoffs and shrinking bonuses place stress on relationships — and, he said, because “there aren’t funds or time for mistresses any more.”

The article goes on, but you get the point.

You could say I’m bitter because I live in New York and have never eaten at (nor even heard of) Masa or Megu.  But as I’ve said before, and as I firmly believe, loss is relative.  That’s not what bothers me about this piece.

Here’s what bothers me: Among other things, aren’t women on Wall Street also losing their jobs? And are all the women in Manhattan who date bankers as shallow as the women profiled in this article? I think NOT (and personally, I know quite a few–but then, most of the ones I know are bankers themselves, too).

So why, then, must we continue to be treated to stories about how the elite are suffering by cutting back on their Botox?  Aren’t there more pressing stories to tell?

Regardless, and as a bit of a tangent, here’s where it gets a little more interesting.  My favorite tidbit from the article?  The fact that a number of these Wall Street widows have gotten together and created a blog, Dating A Banker Anonymous (DABA).  From the site’s description:

Are you or someone you love dating a banker? If so, we are here to support you through these difficult times. Dating A Banker Anonymous (DABA) is a safe place where women can come together – free from the scrutiny of feminists– and share their tearful tales of how the mortgage meltdown has affected their relationships.

As a scrutinizing feminist, I confess to enjoying the frivolity, humor, and enterprising spirit of the site.  Some of it also makes me rather queasy, as I think it’s intended to do.  But check it out for yourself.  Whatever else it is, it’s highly over the top.