Global Gender Gap Report, NOW calls Whitman a political whore, and bride-nappings

Image by World Economic Forum via Flickr

Today is one of those days with too much going on, news-wise. Here are some summaries with a tch of commentary.

2010 Global Gender Gap Report

The World Economic Forum has published its 2010 Global Gender Gap Report, which measures factors like the number of women who hold high-level offices in government and wage gaps to determine how how the genders measure up.

The US has made gains, jumping a full twelve places to reach spot 19. This is the first time it has been in the Top 20 in the five years the report has been put out.

@Huffington Post, or Full Report

California NOW (National Organization for Women) president adopts controversial language

Democratic California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown‘s staffers were caught on tape calling his opponent, Meg Whitman, “a whore.” Cue furor.

It Gets Better

Dan Savage is one of my favorite people. I never miss a Savage Love column.

He is a gay man, in a long-term relationship with his partner. They have a son. They are a happy, stable, loving family.

But their lives weren’t always so pleasant.

And that is why Dan has founded the It Gets Better Project, to reach out to young people who feel hopeless. It is for LGBTQ kids, but also for anyone who has suffered bullying or public shaming. The message is simple, and heartfelt. It gets better. You won’t always in middle or high school, you won’t always live with a family that doesn’t understand. The plea is wrought with emotion: Stick around, don’t give up on life before it can get better!

Below the cut are embedded videos, amazing videos submitted by people who want to tell kids that it gets better. Or, watch them all here: http://www.youtube.com/user/itgetsbetterproject

http://www.itgetsbetterproject.com/

More Suicides

zach harrington

I am unable to type up the next installment as I have been sick all day. (Food poisoning; take it from me — do not eat food from questionable restaurants! This is advice I routinely forget at least once a month.)

But I do want to briefly discuss the two recent reported suicides in the media: those of Zach Harrington and Aiyisha Hussein. Aiyisha Hussein was a student at Howard who felt conflicted by her sexuality — friends mention that it is probably the reason why she took her own life.

Zach Harrington’s suicide spoke volumes about the condition of gay rights in this country. When his town held a meeting to pass a resolution declaring that week an LGBTQ tolerance week, the vindictive reactions of his fellow town hall attendees drove him over the edge.

The Norman Transcript reports:

Some of those who opposed the proclamation claimed that members of the GLBT community would use it to infiltrate the public school system, essentially allowing the “gay lifestyle” to become a part of the curriculum.

Others claimed that council recognizing October as GLBT History Month was a waste of their time. Some members of the audience even suggested that any council members voting in favor of the proclamation may have trouble getting reelected.

Numerous residents also claimed the Bible was their guiding light, citing the ancient text as their primary reason for opposing the proclamation and the GLBT community in general.

As we march forward, we must realize –and make others realize — the following.

1. Gay rights is a civil rights issue. It is our generation’s defining issue. Those who oppose it, as Republican strategist Mark McKinnon says, are on the wrong side of history.

2. We can’t wait until these kids graduate high school to make things better. We need to take the fight there so that we can stop this endless cycle of depression.

3. This has got to stop. Period. If you are anti-homosexual, you are pro teen suicide. That’s the message we’ve got to send out there, and it’s a great one.

The Modern Bully: Someone Else’s Problem

We have this image, in our collective consciousness, of what a bully looks like. It’s a kid, usually a boy, often larger than the other children. He will be either rich and athletic and perfect, or flawed, stupid and angry. Either way, he needs to make himself feel better. He needs to make other people feel worse. So he finds the weakest, and he destroys them. Or he finds those who threaten his position and he wears away at them until they are no longer a threat. The he continues just because he can.

The female bully has gained less notoriety because she is more subtle. Sometimes she takes the imposing form of the large, angry boy, but usually she is a social climber. She wants to be popular; if she is popular, she wants to stay there. She has learned that it is easier to destroy others than to depend on your own good qualities. So she spreads rumors and cuts down other children when they least expect it. She sows seeds. She speaks in a coded language fraught with layered meaning. She does not need to use her fists. Movies like Mean Girls acknowledged that this creature exists, and how she operates.

It is easy to recognize a child or teenager who bruises his fellow classmates. Women can always tell when another female is targeting someone. But bullying has changed, and it continues to do so at lightning speed. 

Clementi and the World, Part 1

 

It takes a village to bully a child.

 

My experience with bullying,
programming notes,
or a prologue

Though I’ve wanted to talk about Tyler Clementi for a long time, I’m unsure at to how. This is my attempt to piece together some kind of truth. I will start by sharing my own high school experience. This has been very difficult for me to write. I hope it helps someone.

In an age of widespread connectivity it’s taken on a different form that what I’ve experienced. I’m very grateful for this. I can’t imagine coping with the mob.

Though I consider my experiences very negative on the whole, I am also not LGBT or Q. So I acknowledge that things could be much, much worse. But this is what I have to go on when I put myself in another’s shoes. I’m always stuck imagining myself a thousand times just before the jump from a precipice. Each time I’m horrified at how close I came to jumping.

Before I start, I need to make a confession.

I made it before (subtly) but I’ll make it again now. I am a Rutgers alum. I graduated a few years ago. My experience might be dated, but I still have connections to the campus so I speak from some experience. (I’m confident that this confession does not blow my cover. More than twenty nine thousand undergraduates attended Rutgers when I did, and the number is constantly growing.)

I can’t say what Tyler Clementi’s problems were before he went to Rutgers. We only know of his roommate Dharun Ravi and the moments that led to his suicide. But I can say that bullying is an epidemic. It’s killed at least five teens in the past month: Jaheem Herrera, Carl Walker-Hoover, Eric Mohat, Billy Lucas and Tyler Clementi. There are even more names, reported and unreported — but that I can even list one is a tragedy.

As Ellen DeGeneres points out, this is an epidemic.

For the past two weeks I’ve been doing the multiplication in my head. If it was bad for me, it was a thousand times worse for Jaheem, Carl, Eric, Billy, Tyler and the unnamed LGBTQ youth.

So I am writing the following for those of us who never experienced being bullied — do those people exist outside of Hollywood movies? — or those of us who have successfully repressed it enough to deny its impact. I’m writing this because the worst three words in the world are “Get Over It.” And after I’m done, you will know why fifteen thousand words are just not enough.

Under different circumstances, this might be poetic.

I’m not a witch. I’m nothing you’ve heard. I’m you. — Christine O’Donnell.

Under different circumstances, this might be poetic. There’s something about her cadence, her slow, sweet way of speaking that makes this feel like it might work as a rock song.

Sure, she might be crazy, homophobic, reductionist, unintelligent and not very creative. But she’s got a sweet speaking voice, and her commercial has a lilting tone to it. It’s beautiful only if you’re not listening.

Link: Russian Journo Students Pose for Putin

 

"Vladimir Vladimirovich, I want to congratulate you in person. Call 8-925-148-17-28"

 

So, apparently there’s this journalism school in Moscow that is known for being very left-wing. But, like any organization, there are always outliers. And it appears that some of these right-wingers love Vladimir Putin so much that they’re willing to bare all and make him a special calendar for his birthday.

“The journalism department [of MGU] is not a nest of the opposition,” Vladimir Tabak, a 23 year old alum of the place told me. I had called the number listed in December’s word bubble (above), and was surprised to get a male voice. Her pimp? (“Ksenya stepped out,” Tabak said by way of apology.) “Those who are in the opposition are always stating their position; those who are for [the government] don’t really express themselves.”

And so Tabak decided to express himself by shooting his fellow MGU-ettes in happy birthday poses, and, along with a female collaborator (Ksenya Salezneva, sophomore, actress, model; December), composed witty birthday greetings to Vladimir Vladimirovich in slick speech bubbles.

Just in case you thought it was the girls’ idea.

Anyway. Tabak, who says he runs a youth-oriented publishing house called Fakul’tet, told me there were no formal auditions for the thing. He found the girls through people he knew, and, according to him, no one said no. They hired a professional stylist (Sasha Rogov) and a photographer (Arseniy Grobovnikov), and finished a run of a 50,000 copies in under three weeks. It’s unclear where they got the money, though Ilya Barabanov (an editor at The New Times and himself an MGU journalism alumnus) alleges Tabakov is tied to Rosmolodezh, another pro-Kremlin youth amalgam, and was behind the controversial reality show about the department, “Zhurfak.” (The latter is very true.)

One thing Tabak wants to make clear: this is not about politics. It’s about birthdays. And sexy ladies. “It’s not political,” he says. “It’s not even campaign season. It’s just a beautiful present that any man would like.” Indeed.

I have no grounding in Russian politics, so I can’t speak to that. I hope that it’s meant as a fun joke, rather than women prostrating themselves before a powerful man.

And it’s not even Vladurday!

https://themoscowdiaries.wordpress.com/2010/10/06/happy-birthday-mr-president/

Update: The left-wing students have countered with their own calendar, featuring some rather severe ladies posing much more difficult questions. “What impact will inflation have on bribes?”

https://themoscowdiaries.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/loosen-up/

Male Panic!: Women Get Jobs, Men Get Depressed?

From first glance at recent covers of Newsweek, Time, and The Atlantic, it appears a gender war has erupted— instead of coddling men, women are taking their jobs! And beating them at their own game! Oh no!

A slew of magazines published this year claim that times are a-changin’. Newsweek sensationally trumpeted the arrival of a “war on boys,” in which men must adapt by “embracing girly jobs” such as nursing and modeling themselves after Brad Pitt. In a later edition, conservative journalist George F. Will decried equal pay for women as sexist discrimination against the “weaker sex” (huh?) The article featured this zinger of a quote, from conservative scholar Diana Furchtgott-Roth: “contrary to what feminist lobbyists would have Congress believe, girls and women are doing well.” It appears Will included her on the popular notion that any commentator with a vagina cannot possibly be sexist, and can act as an authority on all women. To top things off, Time magazine waxed poetic about how “for the first time in history the majority of workers in the U.S. will be women — largely because the downturn has hit men so hard.” The Atlantic chimed in with “The End of Men,” a cover-story which claimed, “Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed.”

Romancing a Feminist or Romancing Your Ego (part 3)

via Flickr

I’m back for the third installment of Romancing a Feminist or Romancing Your Ego. I hope you’ve had fun  thusfar! As always, I’ll put the link to the appropriate TTH page below before starting my commentary on some more of the feedback this post received.

The reader adds:
I know that women do not put too much thought into their politics, and being liberal in this age is a reflection of practically nothing. I’d be much more concerned if, say, she were an avid user of Twitter, or ever wears sweatpants. An artful courtier eludes discussion of politics with women.

One girl would affectionately put her hand over my mouth when I’d muse about politics, and tell how she liked me less when I would say, criticize homosexuals. I would smirk, and go on to something else. It’s a little needy to want a woman to agree with you on every point, and frankly unnecessary.

I recommend the book Way of the Superior Man by David Deida. Aside from some coverage of Tantric sex methods, it has a very good discussion of the sexes, and of how a man is to behave in a relationship and in life.

This reader’s ignorance shines through from the first sentence. Women don’t put much thought into their politics? You mean to tell me that he has met every single woman in the world, or even just a majority of them, and come to this conclusion? He has simply decided that women are intellectually inferior and flighty beings by nature. Therefore, it would stand to reason that they don’t put much thought into anything, including their politics.

Forget Wyclef, but don’t abandon Haiti

Image by dlemieux via Flickr

There’s a great entry on the Huffington Post about Haiti, and how its upcoming elections could be game-changing. Haiti was devastated by an earthquake this past January, a near-fatal blow to an already teetering nation.

Actress Maria Bello wants you to know that lots of women are running for office in Haiti, and why that’s important.

The national elections are at the end of November and the truth is this: If more women win seats in Congress and Senate, it will change the political game in Haiti and be a model for other developing nations. A recent World Bank study found that an increase of women in government has been shown to decrease corruption. Other studies are showing that countries that have high percentages of women in leadership positions are more apt to focus on children’s health and education, social justice and economic stability. A case in point is Rwanda post-genocide, which now has the highest percentage of women in the electorate and one of the fastest growing economies in Africa.

I’ve heard this before, about women in government creating and maintaining systems that benefit people on the ground. I call that a very good reason to encourage more women to enter politics.

Now, before you cry ‘hypocrite,’ let me make it clear that I don’t think all these women should be ushered into office regardless of their skills or positions. Hell, we don’t want the Haitian Sarah Palin taking over! No, these women should be vetted like any other candidate. These studies indicate that a higher percentage of women in government will ultimately be beneficial, but that doesn’t mean the system itself should be circumvented.

I highly recommend reading the whole post: Maria Bello: Wyclef’s Out, but Women Are In (VIDEO).