Thursday, November 22, 2012

Women's Views on News

Women's Views on News

Chinese women still politically invisible

Posted: 21 Nov 2012 04:25 PM PST

China has the world's second largest economy and the world's largest population.  So large, in fact, that one in every five women in the world is Chinese.

Yet despite this, politically speaking, they are all but invisible.

With Communist party diehard Xi Jinping having recently been confirmed as China's new leader, with him came six other communist powerhouses, all men, who together form the Standing Committee, the most powerful decision making body in China.

This group of men will ostensibly run China for the next ten years, and not one of them is exactly known for their reformist views.

So, no women at the heart of power then.  No big surprise – there has never been a woman on the Standing Committee.

But what of the larger Politburo, the country's main policy making body?  Well, female representation has actually doubled in the recent political transition.

There are now – wait for it – two women in the 25 strong body, as opposed to just one.   They are Sun Chunlan and Liu Yandong.

So far, not terribly encouraging.  But even this bleak picture represents an erosion of gender equality – since 1997, China has fallen to 53rd place in the world in terms of female representation at its parliament.

Better news at the Chinese Communist National Congress a few months ago, though, where the number of female delegates rose to 521  -out of a total of 2,270.

That's 76 more women than attended in 2007.

But who were these women?

According to The People’s Daily website, they were little more than window dressing at a boys and their ploys convention.

The website most courteously published a 14-photo slideshow labeled ‘Beautiful ritual girls, female reporters and delegates to the Party Congress become beautiful scenery during the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.’

For many, that just about sums up the status women enjoy in China.

Yet, since the formal establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the government has always stated their committed to the long term goal of achieving equality between men and women.

If they are looking to play the long game, they are certainly succeeding.

Feng Yuan, head of the Anti-Domestic Violence Network in Beijing, described it as 'the longest revolution' and went on to say, 'All other revolutions are pretty easy and short in comparison.'

She is not wrong.  Let's take a look at a few hard facts and figures.

Although female participation in the workforce has increased in the last fifty years, and a large percentage of Chinese women are now employed – 70 percent, compared with 25 percent in India - and although their representation in higher education has also increased, they continue to suffer economically, socially and politically.

There is still a large gender pay gap.

Urban Chinese women earn about 67 percent of what men make, according to a 2010 survey from the All-China Women's Federation, whose website provides a host of statistics on the reality of the place of women in China.

Only 2.2 percent of working women in China are in management positions.

Girls are required to score higher than boys on college entrance exams.

Reports of female infanticide and sex selective abortion have streamed out of China since the ‘one child policy’ was introduced in 1978.

There is no doubt that this very public gender preference is a direct reflection of the status of Chinese women in general, and their battle for equality does indeed look to be a long one.

Ironic, then, that it was Chairman Mao himself who once infamously said that 'anything men can do, women can do too', and that women 'held up half the sky'.

But when women are still frozen out of the political system, how much can they ever actually achieve, when the parameters of what they are allowed to achieve are dictated by men?

The blatant sexism of private landlords

Posted: 21 Nov 2012 10:39 AM PST

A close-up look at sexism in letting – despite the law.

I've rented privately for 12 years and in that time I've had eleven landlords and only one landlady.

This stark imbalance never struck me until I joined Digs, a group of private tenants giving support to other renters in Hackney.

As I began supporting other tenants, I found that brazen sexism was as rife in the private rented sector as it was in other situations where men grossly dominate positions of power.

Last Saturday afternoon I sat in the dazzling white offices of a letting agents on Stoke Newington High Street in East London.

I was there to support Gina, a private tenant who had been without hot water for six weeks.

She was also fighting for control of her home with a particularly tenacious breed of Japanese cockroaches.

Despite Gina's family-sized can of insect spray and the kind of heroic determination normally only witnessed in the movies of Harrison Ford, the cockroaches were winning.

We hoped this meeting with the landlord was a chance to find practical solutions to the problems that was making Gina's home unlivable.

Instead, the landlord flatly refused to accept the boiler was broken.

And he curtly informed Gina that if the cockroaches were anything other than a figment of her imagination, it was only the result of her lax domestic habits.

The landlord spent the meeting trying his level best to get under Gina's skin, dismissing everything she said and derailing the conversation with petty attacks.

Gina took deep breaths and tried to steer the conversation back onto the boiler and the infestation.

Eventually the landlord agreed to send someone round to fix the boiler and the letting agent agreed to take on the issue of the cockroaches.

As we were about to leave, the landlord leaned over to Gina's boyfriend, the co-tenant, and said clearly and unashamedly: "I don't mind dealing with you, you're a man. See her, I'm not going to deal with her, she's a woman".

In that second it became clear why the landlord had refused to engage with Gina professionally and to take her problems seriously – because Gina was female and he didn't see why he should be told what to do by a woman, even if she was paying him upwards of £100 a week in rent.

Having your home in the hands of someone who sees you as inferior can be an incredibly demoralizing experience.

Because of unaffordable house prices and a decline in social housing, the private rented sector is the only option for a rapidly increasing number of people.

And the housing shortage means desperate tenants are in no position to be choosy about the decency of their prospective landlord.

But sexism is not the only form of prejudice that plagues the private rented sector.

In a recent study the charity Stonewall found more than 40 per cent of the LGBT people they interviewed said they still feel insecure in their homes or are facing eviction.

"Unfortunately, LGBT people still face daily harassment and abuse simply because of who they are. Sometimes, that abuse comes from a landlord," Stonewall said.

The Everyday Sexism Project says the problem of sexist landlords is far from rare: “We've received a considerable number of accounts from women who have experienced sexism from landlords and lettings agents.

“Women want and deserve to be able to speak directly to their landlord about issues affecting them in their homes and to be respected as equal tenants" they say.

One female tenant told Everyday Sexism: "Recently [my landlord] phoned me saying “you haven’t been paying your rent now, have you dear?” and questioned whether I understood the online banking process.

“I informed him I had saved all documents with physical proof of my rent payments each month, and that I would be happy to send it to him. He just hung up.”

When tenant blogger Penny Anderson complained to the council about exposed wires in her bathroom which nearly electrocuted her housemate, her landlord was unrepentant.

He told the council:  "You know what girls are like. Always nagging and whining".

And Rosie Walker, another member of Digs, has also been at the cliff face of sexist landlords.

Defending himself against a catalogue of complaints lodged by his tenants, her landlord explained to the council that these were "problem tenants".

When the council officer asked him to elaborate, the aggrieved landlord retorted: "Well the women answer back!"

What is so arresting about these stories is that the landlords in question feel themselves to be beyond censure.

In the testosterone soaked offices of high street letting agents, where Lynx is pumped through the air vents and men flex their bravado in shiny grey suits, landlords can be confident that their views will go unchallenged.

Discriminating against a tenant based on their gender, race, sexuality, disability or religion is a criminal offence, but the private rented sector is a hugely unpoliced area, seething with shady practices.

And these kinds of offences are hard to prove, especially as free access to legal representation dries up.

Landlords like Gina's are well aware the law offer tenants little protection.

At Digs, we are encouraging tenants to start talking amongst themselves and publicly exposing prejudiced and unprofessional landlords.

If you have a story you'd like to share, please get in touch: email hello@hackneyrenters.org

PETA’s Animal Rights and Rape Culture

Posted: 21 Nov 2012 07:00 AM PST

From My Elegant Gathering of White Snows.

Eat Battery Farmed Chickens and Save Women: Challenging PETA’s Reinforcement of Rape Culture.

I know that this flies in the face of common sense and compassion but bear with me here. PETA's campaigns are based on the idea that the objectification, sexualisation, and torture of women’s bodies are a great way to raise awareness of animal rights. They glamorise, romanticise and eroticise Violence against Women because they refuse to either acknowledge the construction of "woman as object" within the Patriarchy, or take responsibility for the harm they cause to women by their campaigns. PETA usually uses the bodies of young, thin, blonde, white women as a canvas for their protest. Whilst their protests garner public attention, it isn't because people are interested in animal rights. PETA have become a spectacle; their message lost in medium of their protest. PETA also seem to have completely forgotten what exactly they have been campaigning for and instead have become obsessed with out-porning the porn industry in their objectification of tortured women’s bodies.

PETA's newest campaign is called “Fur Trim is Unattractive” and it has been getting considerable amount of press for both the level of misogyny and the generalised nincompoopery within it. It isn't a new campaign though. It is yet another recycled campaign designed to shock; despite being neither original nor interesting. It’s the normal “women with pubic hair are unfuckable” motif, as evidenced by the entire porn industry. One would have thought that an organisation who campaigns against the cosmetic industry’s animal testing practises might be aware of the links between pornography, the fashion-beauty complex, and the unnecessary torture of animals. One would be wrong. The very last thing PETA is, is self-aware. Nor do they care that they are supposedly campaigning to prevent the torture of animals by financially profiting from the torturing the bodies of vulnerable women in porn.

Whilst it is undoubtedly unpleasant, the "Fur is Unattractive" campaign is actually rather tame for PETA. Over the past few years, their campaigns and street protests have become increasingly violent and quite deliberate in their use of Violence against Women. They are no longer content with using the bodies of naked women or even carving up women’s bodies as if we were meat. This year alone they have had one advertisement, developed for the Superbowl, banned for having women simulate sex with vegetables; an ad which was only marginally less offensive from Voina's ‘protest’ art involving women having sex with frozen chickens. Their second ad campaign this year, entitled ‘Boyfriend Went Vegan and Knocked the Bottom out of Me’, should have been called An Ode to Violence Against Women: The Romance Period. It features a physically and sexually assaulted woman wearing a neck brace and covered in bruises because her boyfriend, newly vegan, has pounded her in every way possible. Apparently some of the unfortunate consequences of veganism and the subsequent "mind-blowing intercourse" are "sex injuries such as whiplash, pulled muscles, rug burn, and even a dislocated hip." That isn’t sex. It is rape.

A third campaign developed this year to celebrate World Vegan Day involves a large number of men gyrating, in increasingly more violent ways, with vegetables in place of their penis. Surprisingly, nothing makes me want to give up bacon like a Dude with a cucumber for a penis, or so I’m lead to believe. I’m not entirely sure what PETA was aiming for with this but this is pretty much the definition of creepy:

"A cucumber has never looked so good – or so wicked. In honour of World Vegan Day, watch this spicy video that gives a wink to the sexual health benefits of going vegan by showcasing men enthusiastically and proudly showing off some healthy protrusions from their trousers."

PETA have pretty much become a parody of themselves. It would be amusing if it weren’t for their constant perpetuation and perpetration of rape culture.

So, I say we start eating battery-farmed chickens to raise awareness of the objectification, sexualisation and torture of women’s bodies. After all, PETA doesn’t care how it raises awareness or who funds its campaigns, so why should feminists? PETA have gone so far as to develop their own porn channel to supposedly raise awareness of the abuse of animals. You don’t see feminist groups raising funds by offering to kill rabbits live on the web; perhaps we should.

I believe PETA’s advertising campaigns buy into the hyper-sexualised and hyper-masculinised culture in which women are treated as no more than Patriarchal fucktoys. PETA support, perpetuate, and perpetrate rape culture.

So, if PETA wants to reduce the discourse on animal cruelty to simply objectifying women as an advertising tool and encouraging rape culture, I’m going to start buying battery-farmed chickens.

Louise Pennington is a feminist activist, historian and writer with a background in education. Her personal blog My Elegant Gathering of White Snows is part of the Mumsnet Bloggers Network.

Dublin Marching for Savita

Posted: 21 Nov 2012 03:30 AM PST

“The first thing I feel I should emphasise is the sheer numbers of people who turned out.”

Guest post by Orlagh Ni Léid, Alliance for Choice, Belfast

I am a pro-choice activist based in Belfast and I travelled to Dublin on Saturday 17 November for the march which both commemorated Savita Halappanavar’s death and demanded a change to Ireland's 150 year old abortion laws.

The first thing I feel I should emphasise is the sheer numbers of people who turned out.

Estimated at 20,000 strong, for a pro-choice march in Ireland this is astounding.

Men, women and children of all ages, and all backgrounds were out in force.

But, in contrast to the celebratory atmosphere of the March for Choice in Dublin in September, the atmosphere on Saturday was one of grief, shame and anger.

That in this country, women could be dehumanised to the extent that an already dying, insentient foetus, and a superstitious and nonsensical focus on its heartbeat, could take priority over our health and lives is tragic.

In this case Savita's husband was brave enough to speak out – but how many have gone before?

As shameful as this news is, in a way it is also a relief.

A conversation has been sparked nationally, and international attention has now been drawn to the situation in Ireland.

It is once again highlighting the danger of religion influencing politics, and religious and political interference in health care, for all to see.

My own feelings are dominated by anger at the sheer indignity and sexism of a law that essentially sees women as a means to an end – as a life support system for a foetus first – and as people second.

Even calls to make the most basic provisions to protect women have been wilfully ignored by our government.

The supreme court ruled in 1992 (following the X case) that we have a right to an abortion when our lives are at risk; but 20 years later the government has still failed to put forward clear guidelines to allow this ruling to take effect.

As Clare Daly, of the United Left Alliance and one of our speakers, said, what Savita suffered was 'death by political cowardice'.

In Ireland, the opposition to abortion in all instances is fruit from the same tree as the child abuse, the Magdalene Laundries (which existed until 1996), the opposition to divorce (illegal until 1997) and contraception (illegal until 1980).

Similarly, the stance the church takes against abortion is born of control, sexual repression, and misogyny; in particular the attitude that pregnancy, childbirth and suffering are prices that women should pay for having sex.

Along the march route on Saturday we were reminded of these influences by several elderly male protestors, telling us we were marching into hell and holding up a plastic foetus.

While in previous events protesters would simply have swept past them, this time there was anger and confrontation.

But we also received huge support along the route.

And we chanted, we lit candles, and when we reached the Dáil a one minute silence was held, synchronised with other vigils all around the country.

The crowd was then addressed by several speakers, who made our message clear.

The campaign, now titled 'Savita’s laws', first seeks emergency legislation to be put in place to protect women's lives, with weekly protests to keep pressure on the government.

However, as was pointed out, this is not enough.

It may not even have been enough for Savita.

Apart from the difficulties this presents to doctors as they weigh up potential outcomes, it is simply not good enough for a woman to have to be dying before she is entitled to help, nor is it acceptable for any woman to be forced to continue any pregnancy against her wishes.

Savita repeatedly requested a termination, while in agony during a protracted miscarriage and she was repeatedly denied one.

Even without her death this was inhumane.

For this reason the campaign is also seeking to eliminate both the 1861 'Offences Against the Person Act' and the eighth amendment from the Irish Constitution which establishes the 'right to life' of the unborn, endangering and insulting the dignity of women – especially those who are too poor or sick to travel to seek help.

Being there on Saturday truly felt like being a part of a turning point in history for Ireland.

And the determination was palpable.

Some protesters I spoke to were pro-choice activist veterans, while others were new to the cause, either stirred into action by Savita's death or the several events over the past months leading up to this tragic climax.

These events include the billboard campaign by 'Youth Defence' in the Republic and the 'All Ireland Rally for Life' held in Belfast, which both sparked protests, and the recent opening of the Marie Stopes Clinic in Belfast* which has received huge media attention, and both criticism and support.

I think the time when anti-choice groups, North and South, could claim that women are not at risk and that the people of Ireland 'don't want abortion' is at an end.

The pro-choice campaign has now shifted from purely defensive events, such as counter demos, to holding our own marches, rallies and street stalls, which shows we have clear – and considerable – support.

This must serve as yet another warning of what happens when religion and politics mix.

Women must come before ideology.

And we have never been more determined to drag Ireland into the 21st Century.

To watch a video of the march click here.

 

*The UK 1967 Abortion Act does not apply to Northern Ireland. While abortion is technically legal in Northern Ireland when the physical or mental health of the woman is at serious risk, in practice it is just as restrictive as the Republic.