Saturday, July 7, 2012

Women's Views on News

Women's Views on News

Women could delay motherhood (and menopause) with ovary transplants

Posted: 06 Jul 2012 01:00 PM PDT

Laura Mowat
WVoN co-editor 

Women's ovaries can be removed, stored and replaced so that women can have children later in life.

The procedure, which could cost as much as £16,000, is expected to be available within the next six months.

It is currently only available in a few countries, including the United States, Denmark and Belgium.

So far the treatment has mainly been offered to women cancer patients who want to try to preserve their ovarian tissue in case it is damaged through chemotherapy.

Dr Sherman Silber, a microsurgeon from the USA who has performed transplants of ovarian tissue, told a conference of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology in Istanbul this week, that 28 babies around the world had been born to women who had their ovarian tissue removed and then replaced.

The ovarian tissue can also be removed and stored. A woman in Belgium reportedly gave birth after her ovarian tissue was frozen for decade, and in Italy a woman had a healthy baby girl after her tissue was frozen for seven years.

Experts predict that the treatment will soon become commonplace and will be offered to women who want to put off having children for whatever reason or who want to delay (or avoid) the menopause.

Dr Silber said "A woman born today has a 50 per cent chance of living to 100. That means they are going to be spending half of their lives post-menopause."

“You could have grafts removed as a young woman and then have the first replaced as you approach menopausal age. You could then put a slice back every decade.

“Some women might want to go through the menopause, but others might not.”

Controversial debut novel about so-called ‘honour killings’

Posted: 06 Jul 2012 11:30 AM PDT

Laura Mowat
WVoN co-editor 

A provocative debut novel, Seven perfumes of Sacrifice, by American author Amy Logan, explores the untold truths about honour killings in the Arab world.

Logan, from San Francisco, devoted a decade to digging up where, when and why the femicidal custom got its start. It wasn’t easy as people were less than keen to talk about it.

She explained that: "There is a conspiracy of silence around this subject that protects the patriarchal system and helps the perpetrators get away with it."

The UN estimates that 5,000 women are killed annually as a result of so-called “honour killings” but the actual figure may be considerably higher.

Indeed, Logan believes that 800 million women worldwide may be living in constant fear of the life-long death threat of honour killing as part of their culture.

"Amazingly, I couldn't find a number published anywhere; I started to think I might be the most curious person in the world about this."

Logan first learned of honor killing in the '90s when she traveled to Israel on a press trip as a travel writer.

She spent an afternoon in a Druze village – a secretive, Arabic-speaking, thousand- year-old offshoot of Islam who live in the hill towns of Israel and several other neighboring countries.

There she learned they commit honour killings. "I didn't know what it was at first, but I somehow distinctly felt that my life after I heard those words was going to be very different than before."

The Seven Perfumes of Sacrifice is available on Amazon.

Logan is giving 10% of  the book proceeds to the Global Fund for Women.

Zimbabwe’s first lady goes into competition with Nestle

Posted: 06 Jul 2012 10:00 AM PDT

Emine Dilek
WVoN co-editor 

Zimbabwe’s first lady Grace Mugabe has opened her own dairy business in competition with Swiss food conglomerate Nestle which has been doing business in Zimbabwe for more than 50 years.

The Mugabes will now sell milk and dairy products under the first lady's own brand, called Alpha Omega.

Her foray into the food industry is the result of a battle between the Mugabes and Nestle which dates back to 2009 when the multinational giant stopped buying milk from her farm after an intense global consumer boycott led by South African pressure group PASSOP.

The controversy erupted when it emerged that Nestle was buying milk from a farm that had been seized during the land 'reform' programme and handed over to Mrs Mugabe. Scores of people and organizations called for a boycott of Nestle products, if the company did not stop buying milk from her.

Nestle eventually cut its commercial ties, but the Mugabe administration has been pressuring the corporate giant ever since to buy milk from the farm again.

Having realised that the company was not going to shift its position, she decided to start her own brand.

A report on the website of SW Radio Africa says her venture is almost guaranteed to be successful, given that her husband has been systematically destroying the dairy industry in Zimbabwe.

It took him just five years, says the report, after the first land invasion in 2000 to reduce the dairy herd in Zimbabwe by as much as 80%, which involved slaughtering dairy cows for their meat or maiming them in random acts of cruelty.

Seventeen magazine vows to stop photoshopping images of girls

Posted: 06 Jul 2012 08:30 AM PDT

Alice Rodgers
WVoN co-editor 

Seventeen magazine has announced that it will "never change girls' body or face shapes" in published images.

The decision comes after 14-year-old Julia Bluhm started an online petition calling on the magazine to stop altering photos of girls to make them look 'impossibly thin with perfect skin'.

The petition collected a staggering 84,000 signatures and asked the magazine to print one unaltered photo each month.

The petition gained even more interest when in May Bluhm staged a protest outside Seventeen's main office, with signs reading: 'The magazine's for me, make it look like me!"

Ann Shoket, Seventeen magazine's editor in chief responded by declaring that the magazine would be more transparent about its photo shoots and 'celebrate every kind of beauty' in their images.

In the editor's letter in the August issue Shoket published a 'Body Peace Treaty', a sort of pact (signed by the entire staff) in which the magazine promised to only feature images of 'real girls' who are healthy.

In response to Bluhm and activists at SPARK (which campaigns against the sexualisation of girls), Shoket said that she realised it was time to be 'more public' about Seventeen's authentic depiction of real females.

The letter also included a sample of an image of a girl before and after it was altered, claiming that only a few 'minor tweaks' were made to the picture of the 21-year-old model, such as the changing of the colour of the background and the removal of a single flyaway hair.

Bloom and the SPARK summit movement have now turned their attention to persuading Teen Vogue to follow in Seventeen's footsteps on the basis that: "If we can be heard by one magazine, we can do it with another."

To sign the Teen Vogue petition, click here.

UN Women forum calls for more women in the workplace to aid economic recovery

Posted: 06 Jul 2012 07:00 AM PDT

Alexandra Szydlowska
WVoN co-editor

The United Nation’s gender equality organisation UN Women is launching a new forum to discuss how women’s participation in the workplace can aid global economic recovery.

UN Women Executive Director Michelle Bachelet will participate in roundtable discussions with the Economic and Social Council, to highlight the role that women play in stimulating economic recovery and growth.

According to Ms Bachelet: “There can be no sustainable recovery for the global economy without the full and secured secured participation of women in generating that recovery.

“Empowering women economically is not only the right thing to do, it also makes good economic sense. Women could constitute half of humankind’s workforce and are therefore at the centre of any solution.”

According to research conducted in 83 countries, women earn between 10 and 30 per cent less than men and tend to spend more time in unpaid employment.

Initiatives discussed will include women’s access to education, jobs, agricultural land, work initiatives, social protection and other resources to help boost large scale employment for women.

Grass roots women reject CofE bishops’ amendment for ordaining women

Posted: 06 Jul 2012 05:30 AM PDT

Frances Kings
Non-stipendiary Church of England vicar 

In 1992 when the Church of England accepted that women should be allowed to become priests, it was assumed that in due course they would inevitably also become bishops.

But the traditionalists and evangelicals have pulled out every stop since then to prevent women from achieving this rightful completion of their long overdue acceptance as full and equal members of the Christian faith.

It’s now 2012 and the wrangle continues with a meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England (CofE) that starts today for five days of debate. It will then take a vote on Monday about draft legislation that would finally allow the ordination of women bishops.

A group of senior women clergy have, however, written and asked the Synod to postpone the vote, following an amendment to the legislation put forward earlier this year by male bishops who came up with  some amendments to the legislation to placate the traditionalist dinosaurs.

And their proposal? To continue to provide male bishops to parishes who feel unable to accept the oversight of a woman bishop, despite the fact that this was exactly the same fudge that was included in the original measure for ordaining women priests.

The House of Bishops put forward two amendments, which, taken together, would provide male oversight for those who reject women's ordination but only by specially appointed male bishops who themselves clearly and demonstrably reject women's ordination and who would not themselves be under the authority of a woman bishop.

This would provide a parallel system that takes no account of the authority of women bishops at all, or of ordained women at any level of priestly ministry within the Church of England.

The response of supporters of women's ordination was fast and furious.  Although the male bastion rolled out a group of women in support of the amendments, there was a major rebellion at the grass roots against the changes, spearheaded by Women and the Church.

The result appears to be that supporters of women bishops, instead of being mollified by this 'compromise' are now determined to block the passage of the measure completely at the Synod meeting in York this weekend.

As with the Church of England's continued failure to embrace people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, we can only look on in wonder and dismay as the Church of England wrestles with issues that no longer bother most other civilized human beings.

It appears that no further progress towards the appointment of women bishops can now be made until Synod embraces the measure with transparency and sincerity.

Which just goes to show what happens when you have one group of people voting on the ‘rights’ of those outside the group.

Language-learning website portrays women as ‘sex objects’

Posted: 06 Jul 2012 04:00 AM PDT

Laura Bridgestock
WVoN co-editor

The website SexyMandarin.com has been attracting attention for its use of video 'tutorials' featuring scantily clad women, engaged in sexually suggestive activities while delivering lessons in Mandarin.

While the site's founder, Kaoru Kikuchi, says it aims to make Mandarin more accessible, critics have attacked its objectification of women.

Applicants for teaching jobs on the site are required to submit a full-body photo, and details of previous modelling (as well as teaching) experience.

SexyMandarin's first video, published online last December, starts with two young women dressed in lingerie, touching each other on a bed.

Subsequent videos have featured a woman sucking suggestively on a lime, a woman dancing in underwear, a woman removing her bra, and women wearing 'sexy' nurse and police outfits.

Kikuchi’s partner, Mick Gleissner, who produces the videos, says: "it's kind of ridiculous but it's also fun."

However, many women (and men) disagree. In a survey of Singaporeans, most said they found the videos to be offensive and demeaning.

Annie Chan, chairwoman of the Hong Kong-based Association for the Advancement of Feminism, has criticized SexyMandarin as having "exoticised" Chinese women.

Meanwhile the executive director of Hong Kong's Women's Foundation, Sue-Mei Thompson, said the films looked "dated", adding that the Foundation was "vehemently opposed to gender stereotyping, especially anything that objectifies women as sex objects."

Disappointingly, much of the media coverage (in English, at least) seems to agree with the site’s founders, that it’s all just harmless fun.

See, for example, this Huffington Post piece and this RocketNews24 article, which declares: “Now you have no excuse not to start learning (unless you’re female or you’re already dating a sexy Chinese model…)”

There seems, nonetheless, to be a general consensus that SexyMandarin is unlikely to be of much use to those who really want to become fluent in the language. As one article notes, the website itself “points serious learners to another site to learn the language.”

Just another excuse to objectify women then.

United Arab Emirates paying men to marry women over 30

Posted: 06 Jul 2012 02:30 AM PDT

Emine Dilek
WVoN co-editor 

The government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has decided to pay men to marry women who are over 30 and therefore considered too old to be single by UAE standards.

The Gulf state is facing a serious demographic problem with over 60 per cent of single women being over the age of 30.

The Federal National Council (FNC), the country’s consultative body, is extremely concerned.

FNC member Said al-Kitbi said in an interview with Agence France Presse that:”this is very worrying, there are now more than 175,000 Emirati women who are over 30 and unmarried.”

The real problem, he made clear, was the consequences of these women not having children. In a country of more than eight million people, only 950,000 are UAE citizens. The rest are foreign who are increasingly marrying young Emirati men.

The reason seems to be the rising cost of dowries. Although the government has imposed a cap of $14,000, many families demand far more.

To address the problem, the government has decided to give each Emirati man who wants to marry $19,000, as long as it is his first marriage.

However, if a man marries a woman who subsequently cannot conceive, he can access the fund to marry a second time.

Suicide rates of Indian women lower among divorced

Posted: 06 Jul 2012 01:00 AM PDT

Ed Knight
WVoN co-editor

A recent study published in the medical journal, The Lancet, has suggested that the incidence of suicide among women in India is lower among those who are divorced or widowed.

Data samples were taken from 2001 to 2003 and applied to figures for 2010 to estimate the number of suicide deaths in India in that year. About 3% of the 95,000 deaths surveyed were due to suicide.

In terms of India's entire population, this corresponds to 187,000 suicide deaths in 2010, with 115,000 among men and 72,000 among women. Just over half (56%) of women's deaths from suicide occurred between the ages of 15 and 29.

One of the most interesting findings (and which has resulted in the greatest media coverage) is that rates of suicide are lower among divorced women.

The figures are open to interpretation but it may be that divorce allows women to escape unhappy marriages which might otherwise have led them to commit suicide.

The results of the study will further complicate the efforts of a country trying to make sense of itself in the face of divorce rates which have more than doubled in the past six years. The easing of attitudes towards divorce, however, has not been an easy process, and stigma remains.

India’s suicide rates as a whole are among the highest in the world.

Professor Vikram Patel of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and lead author of the report,  commented that suicide is reaching national-crisis levels, and “will soon overtake maternal causes as the leading cause of death in young women, which is staggering.”

This is particularly the case among the highly educated. Patel suggested that:”The most obvious explanation is that the distance you fall when you hit the ground of reality is greater when your aspirations have been built up by opportunities that in reality don’t exist,” he said.

It seems clear, though, that suicide rates can form an interesting, if sombre, reflection on the state of a fast-changing nation.