Feminism

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1910
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2020-07-23 17:14:58
    [post_date_gmt] => 2020-07-23 17:14:58
    [post_content] => A secret language, Láadan, allows women to express feelings and experiences for which English, with its male-centric deficiency of words, phrases and grammar, does not possess.

In May of 2017, while many were still reeling from shock at the spectacle of Donald Trump as president of the United States, the New York Review of Books published an article by Masha Gessen called “The Autocrat’s Language.” Gessen, a non-binary person who uses gender-neutral pronouns, was rapidly taking their place as a Trump explainer, drawing upon years of covering the Putin presidency in their native Russia to position themself as an expert in contemporary authoritarianism. In their piece for the NYRB, Gessen explained that because autocrats distorted the meaning of words by using them to lie, journalists were forced to use an impoverished vocabulary in order to report the truth.  Suzette Haden Elgin, a linguist and novelist, uses a variation on this scenario to inform her 1984 science fiction novel, Native Tongue; it is set in a patriarchal future United States of 2205, a place where the nineteenth amendment was repealed in 1991, stripping women of their rights. To combat male dominance, a group of female linguists invent a language of their own. Today the question posed by Native Tongue seems especially relevant to Gessen’s warning about language manipulation: is it possible to restructure language to re-alter our reality?

A particularly prescient science fiction book can offer an eerie prediction of current events years before they happen. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel A Handmaid’s Tale  describes a dystopia in which women’s civil rights had been rescinded; they could not vote or control their own procreation. Adapted for television in 2018, the steep erosion of rights didn’t seem so far-fetched in the Trump era. The dramatic series reflected the emerging reality that resulted from what Gessen describes as Trump’s ability to invert phrases and words dealing with power relationships into their exact opposite, thus doing “violence to language.”

This violence was strongly exemplified in Trump's July 3rd speech, given in the context of the recent protests demanding that Black lives matter as well as the Covid-19 crisis. In an attempt to discredit those calling for change, Trump spoke of a “new far-left fascism.” He argued that, “If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished.” In twisting these words to speak of discrimination against those in power rather than those who are oppressed, terms such as “fascism,” “censor,” “banish,” “blacklist,” “persecution” and “punishment” are stripped of their original meaning and begin to become hollow.

Native Tongue, the first of a three-book series, envisions repairing this damage to language. In Elgin imagined United States of 2205, women effectively belong to men. They are not allowed to own their own property, or to work outside the home without permission from a male relative. Because interplanetary exchange and colonization are crucial for the United States, linguists play a central role in society as interpreters for extra-terrestrial negotiations. Due to the strong demand for translation, linguistic “lines,” or dynasties, have evolved; each child of the lines is trained in at least one alien language and in multiple human languages. Native Tongue follows a group of linguist women whose secret language, Láadan, allows them to express feelings and experiences for which English, with its male-centric deficiency of words, phrases and grammar, does not possess.

Artificial, or constructed and imaginary, languages (conlang) are spoken in popular television series like Star Trek (Klingon) and Game of Thrones (Dothraki and Valyrian). They are also seen in a wide array of speculative fiction by authors like Francis Godwin and Thomas More. Artificial languages have been used in fiction to explore imaginary voyages and worlds, but in a 2007 interview Hadan Elgin described Láadan as a “thought experiment” with directives for women’s change within society. Elgin, who had a PhD in linguistics, was a writer and poet best known for a series called The Gentle Art of Verbal Defense. She also subscribed to the controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which she described in her book Language Imperative as the idea that languages “structure and constrain human perceptions of reality in significant and interesting ways”.

Accordingly, speakers of different languages see the world in very divergent ways: how one perceives the world is based both on linguistic structures in chosen words and their corresponding broader metaphors. For example, binaries such as male/female are often paired with other associations, such as strong/weak or active/passive. Elgin believed that English is dominated by male perception; that its lack of a vocabulary for women to discuss their feelings and experiences directly structures societal inequality. She argued that this configuration is upheld by societal metaphors, such as “women are objects,” reflected in cultural production ranging from fashion magazines to sitcoms. These structures, she posited, must be directly challenged by language itself. “By the technology of language– we insert new metaphors into our culture to replace the old ones, just as we have done in turning ‘war’ into ‘defense’. You don't use guns, or laws, to insert new metaphors into a culture. The only tool available for metaphor-insertion is LANGUAGE.”

Native Tongue provides a fictional blueprint for how these metaphors can change lived reality. While it takes several lifetimes and one more book in the Native Tongue trilogy, the linguist women eventually finish Láadan; they spread it secretly among themselves and then to some of the wider female population. Once enough linguist women have learned Láadan, the male linguists notice a startling change: their spouses, daughters and relatives have stopped complaining. Frustrated by the lack of nagging, which they realize had spurred them to respond, react and experience a sort of catharsis, the men eventually build separate houses for the linguist women. Left to their own devices, the women are freer to live, interact and express themselves, thus reveling in the real change produced by Láadan.

Láadan attempts to enable this freer expression through modifications to both the structure and intent of the language. Much of Native Tongue is occupied with “encodings”, new words for previously unexpressed experiences. The book includes part of a Láadan dictionary, available entirely online, which contains many words that feel very contemporary:

    
 	
  • ralorolo: non-thunder, much talk and commotion from one (or more) with no real knowledge of what they’re talking about or trying to do, something like “hot air” but more so
    • 
 	
  • rashida: non-game, a cruel “playing” that is a game only for the dominant “players” with the power to force others to participate
    • 
 	
  • rathom: non-gestalt, a collection of parts with no relationship other than coincidence, a perverse choice of items to call a set; especially when used as “evidence”
    • 


While these definitions do fit uncannily well with the present political climate, some of the concepts of Láadan and Native Tongue feel outdated. The stark divisions between gender, for example, fit more with 1980s second-wave feminism in which gender essentialism was a big discussion. There’s also the glaring idea that all women are dominated by all men, which fails to take into account configurations of race, class, ability and non-binary gender identities. The questions posed by Native Tongue feel more relevant to our contemporary situation when  “male domination” is replaced with “patriarchy,” which is defined as an unjust social, political and economic system harmful to all who do not hold power within it. In this line of thought, “women’s language” could be replaced with “intersectional feminist language”—i.e., a language that expresses the views of those who, for a variety of factors, experience discrimination and oppression.

Elgin wrote the Native Tongue trilogy with a ten-year timeline, aiming for Láadan to be adopted by 1994, but this never happened. While scholars such as Ruth Menzies point to the difficulty of learning a detailed new language, it is tempting to agree with Elgin, who argued that Láadan failed because women were reluctant to speak a language that forced them to parse their feelings so thoroughly. One additional detail about Láadan is that its structure makes the speaker state the emotion and intent behind everything they say. Necessary speech act morphemes, such as bíi (“I say to you, as a statement”), bóo (“I request”) and bée (“I say in warning”) are paired with suffixes, such as -li (“said in love”), -ya (“said in fear”) and -d (“said in anger”). Thus, in every sentence, the Láadan speaker must clarify their position with words such as:

    
 	
  • bíili: “in love, I say as a statement…” (bíi + li)
    • 
 	
  • bóoya: “in fear, I request…” (bóo + ya)
    • 
 	
  • béed: “in anger, I say in warning…” (bée + d)
    • 


The type of emotional involvement in constantly analyzing one’s position, intention and feelings seems completely at odds with how English is spoken by those given the most attention, time and money to speak it. Imagine a society in which every politician, but also every citizen, must state their feelings of love, fear or paranoia in every sentence and choose from numerous words for comfort, community and wrongdoing.

In her epigraph to chapter thirteen of Native Tongue, Elgin writes that, “For any language, there are perceptions which it cannot express because they would result in its indirect self-destruction.” Perhaps, as Gessen has warned, this implosion is in the not too distant future, in which the damage done by this era of American politics will leave us with few words that still hold meaning. Native Tongue provides a glimpse of how linguistic repair could be not just a tool to alter reality, but to mold it anew.
    [post_title] => In her 1984 science fiction novel 'Native Tongue,' linguist Suzette Haden Elgin created a feminist language from scratch
    [post_excerpt] => A particularly prescient science fiction book can offer an eerie prediction of current events years before they happen.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => in-her-1984-science-fiction-novel-native-tongue-linguist-suzette-haden-elgin-created-a-feminist-language-from-scratch
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:13
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:13
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=1910
    [menu_order] => 255
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

In her 1984 science fiction novel ‘Native Tongue,’ linguist Suzette Haden Elgin created a feminist language from scratch

by Rachel Pafe

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1682
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2020-04-03 03:40:38
    [post_date_gmt] => 2020-04-03 03:40:38
    [post_content] => 
Despite their liberal manifestos, the Labour Party and the Democrats continue to choose men as their leaders


It wasn’t meant to be like this. This time it would be different; Britain’s Labour party was going to elect its new leader, and this time it would be a woman. They didn’t really seem to have a choice: Labour turns 120 this year, but not once had a woman managed to poll higher than a man in a leadership contest.


On top of that, the original field of candidates looked promising. There were four women— and one solitary man. Two women dropped out early but that still left twice as many women as men in the running.


In the end, none of that mattered. The results of the Labour Party leadership election will be announced next week and, unless there is a major upset, Keir Starmer, the lone male candidate, will be elected leader by a landslide.


It wasn’t meant to be like this. The Democratic candidate was going to be Kamala Harris — or was it going to be Elizabeth Warren? No, it was going to be Bernie Sanders. One thing was certain: it was not going to be Joe Biden.


Biden was polling high but his campaign was poor and he was nowhere to be seen; he was more of the same when the consensus seemed to be that the Democrats needed anything but that. Still, he went on and slowly but surely, until everyone but Bernie dropped out. Now Biden is almost certainly going to be the candidate for president who will face off against incumbent Donald Trump in November.


It wasn’t meant to be like this. Both contests had already been going on for weeks — months! — and were starting to near fever pitch, but the pandemic hit. We know for certain that the Labour party’s leadership race will end with a whimper as everyone remains focused on the coronavirus.


The Democratic convention, meanwhile, feels like it belongs to a distant future: who even knows what our world will look like in July? But this doesn’t mean either race should go unrecorded; there are lessons that will need to be learnt, once we have the time (and mental space) to do so.


Let’s look at what happened in Britain, where the Labour party has now been headed by Jeremy Corbyn for four and a half tumultuous years. He seemed to emerge from nowhere in 2015; with politics well to the left of the party’s mainstream, the 70-year-old lawmaker had for decades been a backbencher with obscure pet issues.


With Corbyn as its leader, the Labour party was in near constant revolt. Factional infighting reached its peak in the summer of 2016, when an attempt to oust him failed.


While his fellow MPs had a famously acrimonious relationship with Corbyn, he saw his popularity with the Labour membership spike and grow exponentially in the first few years. Sadly for him, it didn’t translate into success in the polls; sadly for then-Prime Minister Theresa May, Corbyn’s apparent weakness pushed her to call an election in 2017, which turned into one of the worst campaigns in memory, and resulted in Labour making some unexpected gains.


Buoyed, the left wing of the Labour party claimed victory over its centrist counterparts — whose policies, they insisted, had lost the party the 2010 and 2015 elections — but the triumphalism was relatively short-lived.


After May came Boris, and when Johnson called an election last year, it ended with Labour’s worst electoral results since 1935. The shock came and went, and then came the gloating, this time from the moderates. After warning for four years that the hard left would bring disaster, they felt vindicated.


Corbyn’s faction, on the other hand, claimed that the election had been solely focussed on Brexit, and that the loss could be attributed to the Conservatives’ straightforward Leave message, as opposed to their own muddled position of a second referendum.


Then the leadership contest started, with Rebecca Long-Bailey, Lisa Nandy and Keir Starmer emerged as the three main candidates.


Most people believed that Long-Bailey would win; she always was a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn’s and the membership presumably still loved Corbyn, so it should have been a done deal.


[caption id="attachment_1688" align="alignnone" width="799"] Rebecca Long-Bailey at a Manchester Labour Party event on November 7. 2019.[/caption]


It wasn’t. Stuck in the former leader’s shadow, Long-Bailey struggled to make a case for herself. Yes, she was of the left, no, she wasn’t “continuity Corbyn: yes, she was asked to rate his leadership on television and gave him “10/10”; no, she couldn’t really explain what policies of hers would be a departure from the past few years.


She’s also, well, a bit middle of the road. Brought up in Manchester, she studied politics and sociology at university, and eventually became a solicitor in 2007. She joined the Labour party in 2010, was elected to a safe seat in 2015, and joined the frontbench after Corbyn’s victory, though never quite made waves.


As the party’s spokesperson for business, she pushed on establishing a Green New Deal, but the policy got a bit lost in the discourse; in fact, everything she did in those five years always failed to really land. That she was seen as the given pro-Corbyn candidate was telling.


Many observers have pointed to the similarities between Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, both socialists roughly the same age who tend to have acrimonious relationships with their fellow legislators. But while Sanders has loyalists like 30 year-0ld Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez poised to pick up his torch, Corbyn has left no such legacy. Under Corbynism, no successor was allowed to grow and bloom—and here we are.


Lisa Nandy had the opposite problem. Unlike Long-Bailey, she is not stuck with the Corbynite label. Nandy is a woman of no faction.


[caption id="attachment_1689" align="alignnone" width="799"] Lisa Nandy on September 23, 2018.[/caption]


The daughter of Indian Marxist academic Dipak Nandy and granddaughter of Liberal Party MP then peer Frank Byers, she has been in Parliament since 2010 — a term longer than her two opponents. Despite her pedigree, she has always been a bit of an outsider; often hovering near the frontbench but never fully a frontline politician.


There is a drum she has been banging, often alone, and it is: English towns that used to be safe Labour strongholds are leaving us in droves because we have stopped listening to them, and the party must reconnect with its northern working class base if it wants to survive.


She is absolutely right, of course, and did gain traction when she got to claim that she had been warning that the 2019 election results would be inevitable for a long time. When the party lost seats like Bolsover — held by socialist stalwart Dennis Skinner since 1970 — and Sedgefield, which was home for decades to a certain Tony Blair, people finally started to listen.


 Still, identifying a problem and finding a solution are two different things, and she never quite convinced her peers that she had succeeded with the latter.


Then there is our last candidate, who is simultaneously the most and least exciting figure in the race. On the one hand, he used to be the Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service, for which he was knighted, and is rumoured to be the man Helen Fielding based dreamy Mark Darcy in her 1996 novel Bridget Jones's Diary (later made into a hit film with Colin Firth in the role of Mark Darcy).


On the other, he is boring. Keir Starmer is not an exciting politician; he is a former barrister who measures his words, speaks with the cadence of an expert, and has always managed to keep out of his party’s factional warfare. His policy platform is a bit Corbynite but not entirely so; he appealed to the moderates in Labour but without appearing like one of them either.


In fact, he is currently all things to all people; he really could not be possibly accused of leaning into populism, and he is about to become the Labour party leader. Perhaps his very own brand of establishment dullness will be needed in five years’ time, when Britain’s voters have gone through a full term of Boris Johnson. Or perhaps desperate times call for desperate measures, and he simply is not up to the gargantuan task ahead of him.


In short: Labour is playing it safe. It could have taken a gamble by electing one of two 40-year-old women occupying northern seats, but is going instead with a 57-year-old man based down the road from the current leader’s inner London constituency. Starmer and Biden may be different, but the circumstances of their rise feel eerily similar.




Header image courtesy of Chris Boland.


    [post_title] => In the UK and the USA, the political left has rejected female leadership in 2020
    [post_excerpt] => In their search for a leader who can beat the incumbent, both Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the USA chose white men who represent a status quo ante that already seems like ancient history.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => in-the-uk-and-the-usa-the-political-left-has-rejected-female-leadership-in-2020
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=1682
    [menu_order] => 275
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

In the UK and the USA, the political left has rejected female leadership in 2020

by Marie Le Conte

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1659
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2020-03-13 06:44:37
    [post_date_gmt] => 2020-03-13 06:44:37
    [post_content] => With environmentally conscious, humane butchery, Hannah Miller stakes a position between factory farming and veganism.

Picture a butcher and what do you see?

Perhaps a burly mustachioed man swinging a meat cleaver into a carcass. Hacking away, smeared in blood, working in a quick and inelegant fashion. Heaving body parts up onto his thick shoulder and then slamming them down onto a cutting table.

That out of date image persists but at a New Zealand company, aptly named “A Lady Butcher,” owner Hannah Miller does things quite differently. First of all, there’s no music blaring and no loud power tools or machinery running. In fact, it’s rather quiet—Zen-like, even. 

Miller, originally from Portland, Oregon, practices a type of butchery called seam cutting. It’s careful, precise work where every part of the animal is used. Miller describes this nose to tail work as “mindful” and finds it peaceful.

“When it's just you and a knife you have to pay attention to what you're doing. The seams and the muscles tell you what to do, it's very obvious where to cut. You can't be joking around and having a laugh and singing to music because you'll miss it, you'll miss the intricacies and the detail of that style of butchery, it's that mindful practice, I call it the Zen of butchery,” she says.

Before learning to butcher in London, Miller was a culinary student in New York. After a lecture delivered by world-famous chefs Anthony Bourdain and Fergus Henderson, she was inspired to make the move to the United Kingdom and found that butchery and cooking go hand in hand.

“They're completely intertwined, I don't think you can have one without the other,” she says.

The more butchers understand about the restaurant industry the better they can respond to operational matters like creating workarounds to offer little-used cuts of meat to prevent waste. For instance, when a trend for lamb rumps meant that restaurants might require dozens of lambs a week but were only using one part of the animal for their signature dish.

Practically sharing information and skills also means that butchers can better educate customers on the cuts of meat they need to create the recipe they have in mind. Miller says she would challenge butchers to go home and cook a particular cut and then have them share their experience with the crew the next day.

Before settling in New Zealand, Miller had traveled all over the world always finding that butchers were in short supply. When she landed in New Zealand at dawn, she had her first interview and had secured a job by lunchtime. 

Despite New Zealand traditionally having a meat-heavy diet, with dinner often called “meat and three veg,” Miller was surprised to discover that the majority of cured meats in New Zealand were imported.

A Lady Butcher began to provide homegrown Pancetta, Prosciutto, and Bresaola using grass-fed lamb, local free-range pork, and wagyu, from First Light Farms.  

Sharing meat education continues to be one of the most important parts of Miller’s business philosophy. She gives workshops to chefs in restaurants in Auckland, teaching them how to prepare different cuts to serve in order to use the animal economically. This is a better way for the restaurant to maximize profits and introduce customers to new cuts, but it also serves to reinforce her commitment to less wasteful meat production.

“We've chosen to take an animal for our own nourishment, so absolutely nothing can go to waste. I make sure the bones are perfectly clean, that everything's trimmed properly, part of the whole process is being in the moment, but also ultimately it's about respecting the animal,” she says.

She has also spread that message of education by offering workshops to chefs and in April when her new restaurant, Churly’s Brew Pub & Eatery, opens members of the public will be able to sign up for butchery classes too. This new venture will be a leader in nose to tail restaurants, changing the menu up regularly, sometimes even during service, to ensure all meat cuts are utilized and that nothing goes to waste.

From a 90-kilo animal, Miller says only about 150g should be thrown away. But she says to do this you really need to focus. “You can use absolutely everything, but you need to pay attention. When I teach butchery, I set out the rules and, safety is first, second is nothing, absolutely nothing goes in the bin unless I put it there.”

She says that the skill of the butcher determines much of the waste. Trimming fat from muscles meticulously results in a much higher yield of usable meat. She then renders down all the fat and bones for broths and even dehydrates sinew to make dog treats. Lately, she has also been giving away bones and skulls for people to decorate.

Her message of sustainability may at first glance seem to be at odds with her job. After all, veganism is often touted as the cure for much of the earth’s problems. I asked her if she ever thinks about the impact of meat production on the planet and she said it’s something that she considers daily. 

“It's not really so much about eating meat or not eating meat, it's about eating local, and seasonally. You don't need to eat a tomato in December, if you live in the northern hemisphere,” she says.

 Her remedy is that we all need to eat better quality meat from farmers that we know and trust, returning to a time before supermarkets and discount stores disrupted the relationship consumers had with the people who produced their food.

“Eat meat, but eat less of it, eat a better-quality meat. My husband and I eat meat most days. This week we had beautiful sausages, on the barbecue, I know the farm it came from and we had one sausage and then the rest of the plate was full of cauliflower salad and beautiful guac because right now we have tons of avocados.  We should first be eating local, and secondly, eating better but less.”

Developing a relationship with your local farm is an important step in becoming a more conscious food consumer, as I discovered when I first met Miller at the Taurapa Station in Napier, on New Zealand’s North Island. She gave a butchery demonstration using lamb from Atkins Ranch, who raise 100 percent grass-fed animals that wander and graze over beautiful pasture lands; it’s about as idyllic as farming can be.

In that way, New Zealand which is often described as 18 hours ahead and 20 years behind the rest of the world, really is a pioneer. Miller explained to me that the resurgence of interest in local foods and the proliferation of trendy farmers’ markets seen in the United States has always been part of the food culture in New Zealand.

Sustainability goes further for Miller though, it’s an entire way of life where she aims for balance. “We say regeneration instead of sustainability. Because regeneration is the idea of giving back. So, you're not just taking you actually make sure that this circle is completed. Think about it as a circle, instead of an A-Z,” she says.

Miller knows her customers care about where their meat comes from and how it was raised. At her new restaurant and pub, Churly’s, opening in Auckland, she’ll continue this education.

The restaurant takes its name from a popular kiwi expression. “Chur” can mean thank you, cool, OK, and a range of other expressions. It’s also the name of the mascot at her husband, Andrew Child’s, brewery Behemoth Brewing Company, which is a big part of the new brand.

To help with her increased workload, Miller has just taken on an assistant, another lady butcher, who sent her a message on Instagram asking to be mentored.

“I love that the people approaching me to come work for me and to learn and to invest their time are women. These women that I’ve  worked with have said how empowered they feel, they're just so excited and they have that feeling that they can take on the world and it just fills me with so much pride. I will definitely teach anyone and have a great time with it but there's something special about being a lady butcher,” she says.

 

 

 
    [post_title] => Nose to tail with a lady butcher
    [post_excerpt] => For those who avoid meat because they don't wish to participate in cruel factory farming methods, New Zealand butcher Hannah Miller offers a different approach.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => nose-to-tail-with-a-lady-butcher
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=1659
    [menu_order] => 278
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

Nose to tail with a lady butcher

by Fiona Tapp

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1639
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2020-02-27 14:38:21
    [post_date_gmt] => 2020-02-27 14:38:21
    [post_content] => In the coming election, the 21st Congressional district of northern New York State will choose between an incumbent who voted to reverse the Affordable Care Act—and a Democratic challenger who has devoted her political career to expanding healthcare access.

On a recent Thursday, Tedra Cobb rolled out of bed before 6 a.m. and did a kickboxing workout in the basement of her home in Canton, N.Y. She needed to blow off some steam–or “get my ya-yas out,” as she put it—after a frenetic few days traversing her 17,000 square mile district in upstate New York, the largest Congressional district east of the Mississippi, where she’s running against Republican incumbent Rep. Elise Stefanik. 

Those who watched the impeachment hearings will remember Stefanik, who achieved dubious fame with her unswervingly Trump-loyal line of questioning. On November 17 Trump tweeted a clip of Stefanik grilling former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch about Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, commenting: “A new Republican Star is born.” The 35-year-old Congresswoman was rewarded for her dramatic, if intellectually dishonest, interrogations with a slot on Trump’s impeachment defense squad, alongside seven of the biggest far-right devotees in the House of Representatives. By the time Stefanik flew back from Iowa—photographed on a plane packed with surrogates wearing red “Keep America Great” hats—Trump was getting ready for his post-impeachment revenge spree, which Stefanik dutifully defended in the press. And the love fest continues: “Trump Has A Crush on Rep. Elise Stefanik,” declared a recent headline in City & State, a local news outlet. 

Trump went so far as to single out Stefanik during his post-acquittal speech in the White House East Room. “It’s most incredible what’s going on with you, Elise,” he said. “I was up campaigning for helping her and I thought, ‘She looks good, she looks like good talent.’ But I did not realize when she opens that mouth, you were killing them, Elise, you were killing them.” And, if nothing else, Trump loves a killer that looks good on television. 

Despite the impeachment hearings, Trump’s nationwide approval rating is at 49 percent—an all-time high since he took office in 2017. But in Northern New York, the 21st district—a mostly rural, economically challenged region that borders Vermont and Canada—is something of a “pivot” zone: it went twice for Obama before flipping red in 2016. So, will Elise Stefanik’s association with an increasingly erratic, impeached President help or harm her in 2020? And how will Cobb adapt for her rematch against Stefanik at a time when all local politics are being devoured by a national meta-narrative? 

I was looking forward to discussing these issues with Cobb, 52, who is a former volunteer firefighter, ESL teacher, healthcare non-profit founder and St. Lawrence County legislator, as she gears up for one of the most closely watched Congressional races in the country this November. 

There were some hurdles, however—mostly self-inflicted. That is to say, TapeACall Pro, the app I typically use to record interviews, kept malfunctioning. After the third dropped call, I apologized to Cobb, explaining that I was going to attempt to use an old-school digital voice recorder to capture our conversation instead. There was one problem: I hadn’t changed the batteries since the Obama Administration. Could she call me back in five minutes? Far from being annoyed by my technological issues, Cobb was calm and compassionate, seeing this mishap in a broader context: “That’s what we all need—many, many Plan B’s,” she said.

I had not yet internalized the lesson of the Iowa Democratic caucuses debacle: if you want to get something done, do not rely on an app. 

Once I figured out my Plan B, Cobb told me about how her career in public service led her to this moment. A resident of St. Lawrence County for the past 30 years, she was inspired to run for the first time in 2017, after Stefanik voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. For Cobb, who had spent her career as a healthcare advocate—she worked as an educator for a local HIV/AIDS outreach program and served as Executive Director of a community health non-profit—the vote was a call to action. Just a year earlier, her daughter, now a senior at Cornell, had to have emergency back surgery, “and I didn’t blink an eye because I knew I had good insurance,” recalls Cobb, who at the time was working part-time at SUNY Potsdam, her alma mater. 

But a month after her daughter’s surgery, Cobb lost her job and her medical insurance. She realized that Stefanik’s vote to end the Affordable Care Act “would have repealed all the protections for people like my kid who have preexisting conditions,” she said. “I’ve been elected before”—to the St. Lawrence County legislature, where she beat a Republican incumbent and served for eight years—“and I just knew that feeling of, ‘I’ve gotta run.’” 

Cobb won the 2018 primary with 56 percent of the vote, but her victory was a pyrrhic one: she had blown through all her money and had to start fundraising from scratch for the general election, during which she was outspent by her opponent 3-to-1. Stefanik won the election by a 14 percentage-point margin, which seems like a lot until you compare it with her margin of victory in the previous election—35 percentage points—when she ran against a retired army colonel named Mike Derrick. Given that context, Cobb was encouraged by the results. 

“I knew going in that it might take two cycles,” she said. 

Supporters in her district are sticking with her. Rebecca Y. Rivers, owner of the Northern Light Yoga studio in Canton, New York, voted for Cobb in 2018 and plans to do so again this year. “I believe Tedra has what it takes to win because she has demonstrated greater interest in the residents of NY-21 than her opponent has,” says Rivers, 53, adding that she shares Cobb’s positions on healthcare, reproductive choice for women, environmental protection and public education. “Many in this district are seeking new representation after feeling that they haven’t been heard by Rep. Stefanik, who was making herself rather scarce and inaccessible in the district prior to seeing Tedra’s popularity increase.” (Until 2018, when she and her husband bought a home in Saratoga County, Stefanik didn’t live in her district, using a home that was owned by her mother as her address. “I like to say that we finally made her pay taxes here, like the rest of us,” said Cobb.)  

Michelle Poccia, a real estate broker who lives in Wilton, New York, says she had “high hopes” for Stefanik when she took office in 2015 at the age of 30, making her at the time the youngest woman to ever serve in Congress. “It sickens me to see someone from her generation making a play to be a career politician by latching on and following the cues of some of the most irritating, non-productive talking heads of her party,” says Poccia, 64, who changed her lifelong party affiliation as an Independent to a Democrat in 2016. “Being a puppet to the likes Jim Jordan and so obviously seeking favor with the most corrupt President in our country’s history has been painful to watch.” 

It has been painful not just for people in the 21st District. This time around, with Stefanik’s rise to the national spotlight, Cobb has seen more support emerge nationwide as a result. Before the impeachment hearings began last fall, Cobb had raised $656,000 and had about 2,000 Twitter followers. But by November 18, right after Stefanik battled with Rep. Adam Schiff when she interrupted the House Impeachment hearings, Cobb had a blowout fundraising weekend, generating $1 million from donors in all 50 states. Since then, her Twitter following has grown to more than 262,000, compared to Stefanik’s 324,000. At last count, Cobb had $2.7 million in her war chest, versus Stefanik’s $4.5 million. She recently was endorsed by End Citizens United, a non-profit devoted to getting money out of politics, which means that Cobb won’t accept money from corporate PACs; her campaign’s average contribution size is $27. 

And Stefanik seems to be feeling the heat. “My opponent is raising money from the Hollywood liberals calling me #TrashyStefanik,” she tweeted on November 17. She was referring to George Conway, the husband of White House advisor Kellyanne, whose vocal opposition to Trump is an ongoing media saga. Conway tweeted on November 16, “.@EliseStefanik is lying trash. Please give to her opponent, @TedraCobb.” In response, some online supporters launched what became the aforementioned trending Twitter hashtag, #TrashyStefanik. Cobb says she doesn’t engage in name calling and has never herself used that hashtag to describe her opponent.

Amid the rise of the #MeToo movement and a surge in the number of women who were raising their hands to run for office, the Cobb-Stefanik faceoff in 2018 also had the distinction of being the only race in New York in which two women were going head-to-head as major party candidates for a House seat. Depending on the primary results, the situation may be the same in New York this year. But according to EMILY’s List, at least 20 likely matchups for House races nationwide will feature two women running against each other. 

Initially seen as a moderate, Stefanik has been drawn further and further into the Trumpian distortion field, like so many who get close to him. “In all honesty, when Elise Stefanik was first elected in 2014 I did not think that she would be bad for the district,” says John Cain, a 45-year-old high school history teacher from Watertown, New York. “The hopefulness I once had for her ability to represent our area has been destroyed by more recent events in her career.”

In addition to voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act, she voted to support the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, an extreme piece of legislation that would have required all states to recognize permits issued in concealed carry states. She voted to allow coal companies to dump toxic waste into local streams without monitoring the damage that they were causing. She has also adopted Trump’s style of juvenile name-calling, referring to Cobb as #TaxinTedra and a “total trainwreck” on Twitter, and mocking elites even though she, like Trump, would by all accounts be considered a member of America’s elite socio-economic class. 

During the impeachment hearings, for example, she slammed Democrats for selecting renowned constitutional law professors, such as Harvard Law’s Noah Feldman, to respond to legal questions surrounding impeachment, arguing that “they are not in touch with the viewpoints of millions of Americans.” Stefanik is a Harvard graduate who previously worked for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan; she failed to elaborate on who would be better qualified to weigh in on questions about constitutional law than professors who specialize in constitutional law. 

“She’s just like Trump,” says Cobb. “She calls names, she tells lies in her campaign. But quite frankly for me, always the mission is to make sure more and more people know who I am.” 

On the day Stefanik made headlines when Rep. Adam Schiff, following House rules, refused to acknowledge her questions—“the gentlewoman will suspend,” he told her repeatedly, over the objections of Rep. Devin Nunes—Cobb was focused on an issue closer to home. Her sister, who was struggling with addiction, needed a detox bed. The episode was a metaphor for her whole campaign, and her promise to provide much-needed healthcare for everyone in her district who needs it: “Elise Stefanik was performing to get attention for herself,” she says, “and I was trying really hard to be a sister and to also be meeting with people in this district.” 

All local elections are now haunted by the specter of the vindictive bully occupying the White House, but Cobb is quick to point out that she is not running against Trump. “I am running against Stefanik. I got into this race because Elise Stefanik voted to take people’s healthcare away. And she’s doing it again,” she said, referring to Stefanik’s December vote against the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act, which would have given Medicare the power to negotiate directly with drug companies. “So she cares more about the pharmaceutical companies, because they are her donors, than the people in this district who are wondering, ‘Do I take my prescriptions or do I eat?’” 

At this stage in the campaign, it’s hard to gauge voter sentiment–polls aren’t yet publicly available—though the non-partisan Cook Political Report said in November that they considered Stefanik to be “not vulnerable.” But, as we learned in 2016, a lot can change between February and November. The lack of a Democratic primary in the 21st district this year will allow Cobb to better allocate her campaign resources, and continue to emphasize Stefanik’s record on health care and the environment, while tying her personally to Donald Trump. Because as much as Cobb says she’s not running against Trump, 2020 will be a referendum on his leadership and the example he has set.  

For example, just last weekend Cobb released an ad calling upon Stefanik to return a campaign donation from Las Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn, who resigned from his role as finance chair for the Republican National Committee amid allegations that he sexually assaulted dozens of women, including employees. So far, she’s keeping the money.  

“I think it is absolutely disgusting that any politician would hold on to the dirty money that Steve Wynn has passed around,” says Cain, the high school history teacher. “I was relieved to see most politicians give it back, and outraged that Stefanik, who has claimed to be a supporter of advancing women in politics, would refuse to do so, even after being called out on it publicly.” 

 
    [post_title] => Meet the Democratic candidate who plans to flip her district and take it back from the woman Trump called "a new Republican star"
    [post_excerpt] => 
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => meet-the-democratic-candidate-who-plans-to-flip-her-district-and-take-it-back-from-the-woman-trump-called-a-new-republican-star
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=1639
    [menu_order] => 280
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

Meet the Democratic candidate who plans to flip her district and take it back from the woman Trump called “a new Republican star”

by Rachel Dodes

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1375
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2019-09-06 17:50:29
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-09-06 17:50:29
    [post_content] => A few months into his year of reading female authors, he developed a feminist spidey sense.

Inspired by television producer Shonda Rhimes’s manifesto Year of Yes, a friend spent 2017 saying ‘yes’ to every challenge thrown her way. In the same spirit, I decided that 2018 would be my year of reading women. My friend starred in a local production of the Wizard of Oz, and became pregnant with her first child. The shifts in my life were less dramatic, but notable nonetheless

I was proud to call myself a feminist, but had started to realize that my tastes did not reflect my politics.  I believed in equal pay, in sharing domestic responsibilities, in righting historical wrongs; but when I got home after a day at the office, I would put on a Kamasi Washington record, pour myself a glass of Eben Sadie wine, and read the new Murakami. If I looked up, I would see an apartment decorated with art by men, with the exception of a lone Louise Bourgeois multiple. I needed a re-education.

A mild panic set in after I made the decision, in December 2017, to spend the coming year reading books by women. It was similar to the one I felt a year later, when I decided to give up alcohol for lent. But I quickly rationalized the project. There was exceedingly more worthwhile literature in the world than I could ever read. By limiting myself to women, I argued to myself, I would not jeopardize the quality of my to-read list; I would just change its focus. And if, after all, it was a big disaster, I could revert to my sexist ways in 2019.

In the publishing industry, conventional wisdom holds that men do not read books by women. The evidence, however, suggests that this perception does not reflect reality, although Joanna Rowling did yield to the suggestion that she might sell more books if she styled herself as J.K.. I knew I was not unique in failing to live according to my ideals, but this knowledge was not validating. I wanted to change, and I believed I could. Research has shown we can reprogram our subconscious: decorating one’s work or living space with images of successful African Americans, for example, is shown to decrease implicit anti-black bias.

I decided that the books I would read over the following year could be in any genre, and on any topic. I would make exceptions for reading related to my work or studies, and for long-form journalism in periodicals. But that was it. Even if a favorite male author published a new title, it would have to wait until 2019.

January was a few days away, so I had to figure out how to begin. I read a New York Times list of best art books of 2017, which recommended the novel Autumn, by Ali Smith. That seemed as good a place to start as any, so I ordered a copy. It was magnificent.

Finding books was, as you might imagine, easier than I had anticipated. We can often identify gender from a name. When in doubt, the dustjacket will typically provide clarity; even if there is no author portrait, a bio will refer to ‘her city of birth,’ or ‘his fifth novel.’ I did occasionally get it wrong: Tracy Daugherty, who authored a biography of Joan Didion, is a man.

I became far more acutely aware that newspapers and magazines review fewer books by women than by men. While I could have guessed this prior to my year of reading women authors, I had never given it much thought. I was discovering the patriarchal pattern that determines what we read, and when. Perversely, this pattern actually turned my experiment into a pleasurable game — a big feminist where-is-Waldo, if you will.

Nowhere was this game more challenging than in airport bookstores. I had struggled to find books while in transit even before 2018, but now I was forced to be open to unfamiliar authors and genres. As a result, some of the highlights of my year originated in airports. I read my first fantasy novel, The Shining Girls, by Lauren Beukes. I liked it so much I followed with Zoo City. On a particularly long intercontinental flight I alternated between watching The Handmaid’s Tale on the inflight entertainment system and reading two books — Margaret Atwood’s Freedom and Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s classic Women Who Run With the Wolves. I am still astonished to have discovered the latter in the tiny bookstore of my hometown airport.

A few months into the year, I started to develop a certain vigilance, a feminist spidey sense. I imagine it is second nature to many women, but it was new to me.

During a visit to Amsterdam I visited a well-known feminist bookstore called Xantippe and asked the salesperson for a recommendation. She directed me to Grand Hotel Europa by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer. A man. Not wanting to appear to second guess the store clerk, whose age, appearance, and occupation gave her a natural authority on matters of gender and literature, I mumbled something about the book’s heft, and asked for other suggestions.

Despite shelves largely filled by women, the next two recommendations were also written by men. At this stage, I quietly suggested I had walked into this book store on purpose. It was an awkward moment. When we regained our composure, we discussed the salesperson’s experience that men don’t read women, which had prompted her suggestions. She also insisted I read Pfeijffer at some point, because it really was that good. I left with a new novel by Eva Meijer.

What my encounter at Xantippe alluded to, of course, was that there is no such thing as women’s literature. Yes, non-fiction with feminist under- or overtones had become one of my staples: I read and internalized the voices of Roxane Gay, Joan Didion, Terry Castle, Sisonke Msimang, Zadie Smith, and Maggie Nelson. They gave me a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the range of female experiences in our sexist world, in a way that only the written word can.

Yet many of my most exciting discoveries were novels. Among them were Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, which won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize; Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra, winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulker award; and The Parisian, the stunning debut of 27-year old Isabella Hamad. Any lingering suspicion I had that women restrict themselves to certain themes or subject matter was put to rest by the depth and range of these three writers.

It turned out that my rule did even not even preclude me from reading about dead white men. One of my other airport bookstore finds was a biography of Seneca, by Emily Wilson.

While it is, in all respects, a classic biography, Wilson is more attuned to the gender dynamics in Seneca’s life than most male biographers would have been. Something similar had happened for me. The spidey sense I first noticed about halfway through my year of reading women had, towards the end of the twelve months, become a program that ran permanently in the background of my consciousness. I instinctively played where-is-Waldo, extending it to other domains, too. I started looking for women in jazz. Female wine makers. When reading the news, I was more likely to notice a byline. I searched out women in politics.

I am now well into year two.  While I have recently cheated — I succumbed to the overwhelming marketing for Sapiens, and did eventually read Pfeijffer’s Grand Hotel Europa — I still read women almost exclusively. They enrich my life. They give me a broader horizon. And slowly but surely, they are chipping away at my subconscious sexism. The slight sense of dread I felt when first conceiving the experiment is now a source of embarrassment. To quote feminist icon Diane Lockhart, “I realize it’s alright that the world is crazy, as long as I make my little corner of the world sane.” One book at a time.
    [post_title] => His year of reading women
    [post_excerpt] => The experience of committing to a year of reading only books written by women gave him a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the range of female experiences in our sexist world.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => his-year-of-reading-women
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
https://lithub.com/the-exiles-of-azareen-van-der-vliet-oloomi/
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:03
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:03
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=1375
    [menu_order] => 302
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

His year of reading women

by Joost Bosland

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1270
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2019-08-02 17:50:22
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-08-02 17:50:22
    [post_content] => Can an authentic apology from a perpetrator heal the wounds caused by sexual assault? 

In her new book The Apology, Eve Ensler — best known for her groundbreaking play Vagina Monologues and for her activism in the movement to end violence against women — imagines her now-deceased father apologizing for having abused her sexually when she was a child. In a podcast conversation about the book with comedian and writer Marc Maron, Ensler observes that while the #MeToo movement has exposed the endemic abuse perpetrated by powerful men, we have yet to see many, or any, of those men make a serious commitment to accounting for their behavior. With this book, she tells Maron, “I thought to myself, maybe I could write what I want to hear, maybe I could write the words and what it would sound like and look, so it could be a possible blueprint.”



It seems that the #MeToo movement has reached a plateau. The consequences for the perpetrators are stuck in limbo as society searches for the means to effect necessary systemic change. As Ensler says to Maron, “We’ve broken the silence. But now men have to do their part of this or we’re not going to move forward.”

Almost none of the prominent men exposed and demoted by #MeToo has offered a real apology — let alone an act of contrition. Charlie Rose, Louis CK, Russell Simmons, James Toback, and Kevin Spacey all issued statements laced with puzzlement, self-pity — or, in Toback’s case, outright hostility. Others verged on the satirical: celebrity chef Mario Batali sent a mass e-mail apology that included the postscript: “In case you’re searching for a holiday-inspired breakfast, these Pizza Dough Cinnamon Rolls are a fan favorite.” The writer Geraldine DeRuiter won a James Beard Award for an article in which she frames her experience of following Batali’s failed recipe as a satirical allegory for his non-apology.



Quite a few of these men tried to fast track a comeback, circumventing both apology and expressions of contrition. Charlie Rose approached feminist editor Tina Brown with the idea that she produce a program with him interviewing prominent men who had been toppled by #MeToo (she declined). Louis CK received a standing ovation when he appeared unannounced to do a stand up set at New York’s famous Comedy Cellar, only a few months after he acknowledged that he had on several occasions stripped naked and masturbated in front of female comedians whose nascent careers were predicated on his goodwill. And last October The New York Review of Books published a 3,000-word, first person essay by Jian Ghomeshi, the disgraced Canadian former radio show host. The CBC fired Ghomeshi in 2014 after learning that the Toronto Star was about to publish an investigative report detailing credible accusations that he had for years battered women during sexual encounters, and had abused women who worked for him. Titled “Reflections from a Hashtag,” the essay is redolent of narcissism and self-pity. It begins:

Not so long ago, I spoke to hundreds of thousands of listeners across North America every day on a public radio show. These days, the closest I come to public performance is at a neighborhood karaoke bar in New York. Even that can have its perils.

Ghomeshi was oblivious to the rather obvious contradiction in having been granted the platform of one of the most prestigious publications in the English language from which to proclaim that he had been silenced.



Reaction to the essay was swift and negative, rising to a crescendo of outrage after Ian Buruma, then editor of the NYRB, made some egregiously tone deaf remarks in a follow-up interview conducted by Isaac Chotiner for Slate. One line in particular lit up the internet. In response to Chotiner’s observation that several women had credibly accused Ghomeshi of having punched them in the head during sexual encounters, Buruma responded:

The exact nature of his behavior — how much consent was involved — I have no idea, nor is it really my concern.

For Buruma, apparently, the fact that a Canadian court had declined to convict Ghomeshi of rape based on existing jurisprudence was the only relevant consideration. His response indicates that he is not at all interested in issues of morality, in the feelings of women. Nor does he address the question of whether or not jurisprudence is equipped to provide justice to women in cases of sexual assault that do not meet the legal definition of rape. Buruma seems not to know (or perhaps does not care) that Ghomeshi acknowledged, in a first-person essay published on his Facebook wall, that he committed many violent sexual acts on women. Ghomeshi claimed they were consensual “rough sex,” but his essay does not include the viewpoints of the women who accused him of assault.

Is being fired from their jobs and socially marginalized sufficient punishment for these men? There are those who say yes, and who further assert that women who demand punishment that goes beyond sanctions are indulging in gratuitous rage. In response, feminist journalist Rebecca Traister offers this observation in an essay published for New York magazine's The Cut:

Today, there’s quite a bit of blowback at these guys on social media. Which makes it crucial to point out that irritation — or flat-out rage — at the men attempting professional comebacks after having been credibly accused of sexual harassment and abuse isn’t necessarily about a punitive urge to see them forever in purgatory.

The goal, in other words, is not to seek eternal damnation for these men, but rather to see them doing the kind of work that would actually change the paradigm. So far, none have accepted this challenge.

There is, however, at least one recent example of a famous man who did offer a considered apology to the woman he had assaulted.

Late last year the journalist Zainab Salbi interviewed Devin Faraci, once an influential film critic who was editor in chief of birth.movies.death, for a PBS television series called #MeToo, Now What? Today, Faraci earns his living making coffee at a Starbucks; he resigned his editorship after a woman accused him of sexual assault. Separately but in the same episode, Salbi also interviewed Caroline Contillo, Faraci’s accuser. Caroline told The Conversationalist that PBS had informed her they would do a segment on Faraci with or without her involvement.

Faraci’s fall predated #MeToo by about one year, and he truly brought it on himself. A self-proclaimed feminist, he tweeted his disgust at the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Donald Trump boasted of having committed sexual assaults on multiple women, by “grabbing them by the pussy.” In response to Faraci’s comment, Caroline Contillo fired off a tweet, in which she accused him of having done the same thing to her. Within days of the ensuing Twitter storm, Faraci, who acknowledged a severe alcohol problem that causes him to black out and often precipitated bad behavior, apologized and resigned. But just one year later, he was quietly rehired. This premature attempt at reestablishing his career elicited a cascade of negative reaction, and Faraci resigned for a second and final time.

Here the story deviates from the script: rather than licking his wounds angrily as he searched for another way to make a professional comeback, Faraci entered a 12-step recovery program. He now seems committed to a process of transformation and to making an authentic apology.

[caption id="attachment_1275" align="alignnone" width="300"] Devin Faraci (screencap)[/caption]

While Salbi’s separate interviews with Caroline and Faraci are short and somewhat superficial, they do provide insight into the impact of sexual assault and the power of a sincere apology. A victim who receives an acknowledgement of wrongdoing and a heartfelt expression of contrition from the perpetrator can experience a powerful physical and emotional response. In the interview, Contillo tells Salbi that while the assault itself was terrible, a “larger psychological pain had lodged itself” in her body.

Caroline Contillo highlights one of the less understood effects of trauma — that it invades the body and stays there, long after the physical act. Ensler says the same thing to Maron: that when a victim receives an apology that carries empathetic recognition by the perpetrator, it causes a physical reaction. Contillo said that Faraci’s apology provided relief not only because she could let go of the pain, but because she now felt that she was “living in a culture that suddenly seemed to care about” women who had been sexually assaulted or preyed upon.

Faraci offered his considered apology as part of a 12-step program. He said he had been eager to offer it sooner but was counseled to wait for that stage of the recovery process (step nine of the 12 steps); he decided “to trust the process.” In Alcoholics Anonymous, as in other frameworks for personal transformation, an apology is valued for its sincerity. Absolution is a nice bonus, but it is not the motivating factor.

In an email to The Conversationalist, Contillo writes, “My acceptance of his apology was an indication that I believe he could change — not evidence that he has.” But she does seem to feel that PBS coerced her to participate in the #MeToo program by telling her that the interview with Faraci would be broadcast with or without her participation, and that Faraci overstepped by failing to inform her before publishing a blog post about his apology and her having accepted it. Contillo says that she is not “optimistic that any deep-seated transformation has taken place.” But perhaps she would feel differently if PBS had approached her with more compassion, and if Faraci had consulted her before publishing his blog post.

“Does a sincere apology hold the key to transformation?” Contillo wonders.

I totally believe so. I had hoped to talk on the PBS show more about that, and my work with the Zen Peacemakers, who do reconciliation work. But I quickly realized when I was on set that it wasn't really going to be about that. I do hope that story gets told: that when we can face a seemingly intractable situation of harm without turning away and without jumping in to fix it with a transaction, shifts can happen.

The power of Eve Ensler’s book is that it offers real insight into how to engage with what the perpetrator did while finding a way toward reconciliation and healing. The father she conjures is fully human, even as he speaks to her about his monstrous acts. Without excusing his behavior, Ensler draws from the depths of empathy to understand how a father could do such harm to his daughter. She shows the darkest interiors of human behavior, but also finds the source of the hurt and anger that cause it. In writing the book, Ensler experienced what she calls the “alchemy of the apology.” In her conversation with Maron she says that it “changes the chemistry of your own being.”

It starts to release things that have just been stuck there — and not knowing…and searching…why did this person do this to me?”

Maron’s own reaction to reading the book seems almost to be an incarnation of that alchemy, of exactly what Ensler intends the book to do. Throughout their podcast discussion he is clearly grappling in near-agony with toxic masculinity, as he experiences it and as he observes it in others. He is unpacking the issues in real time, with Ensler as his interlocutor-slash-therapist. For Ensler, the conversation with Maron is an opportunity to see the book’s effect on a male reader. That is why, although The Apology is a brutal account of what her father did to her when she was a child, it also offers, as Ensler describes it “a bridge.” She asks:

“Do we want to keep punching at each other or do we want to stop violence; to build a world where women feel equal and free and safe and men feel really good about that, [so that] they feel like we are all in the same story?”

While #MeToo raised awareness significantly of the pervasiveness of predatory male misbehavior and its corrosive effect on women, the road to change is paved with many obstacles. If we are to uproot this pervasive, toxic behavior from our society, we will have to embark on a painful but necessary transformative process that includes truly sincere, well-considered apologies from the perpetrators to their victims, with no strings attached. One of the positive effects of the heightened awareness that comes with #MeToo is that now we know what we need to do; the issue is finding the will to do it. Ensler’s The Apology provides the roadmap to change. Devin Faraci and Caroline Contilllo's experience shows the direction this process can take. Certainly, transformative justice is a tricky thing to achieve. Society does not usually reward those who undertake the painful process, while establishment forces like lawyers and public relations agents caution their clients against it. But if we are truly committed to changing the status quo, then we must also commit to the process — painful though it may be.
    [post_title] => When 'I'm sorry' is meaningful: seeking transformative justice in the age of #MeToo
    [post_excerpt] => As the #MeToo movement struggles to define adequate punishment for perpetrators of sexual violence, a new book explores the power of a sincere apology.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => when-im-sorry-is-meaningful-seeking-transformative-justice-in-the-age-of-metoo
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/drafthouse-caught-firestorm-as-devin-faraci-breaks-silence-1039241
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:03
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:03
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=1270
    [menu_order] => 309
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

When ‘I’m sorry’ is meaningful: seeking transformative justice in the age of #MeToo

by Yael Friedman

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 1210
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2019-07-12 16:16:52
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-07-12 16:16:52
    [post_content] => The proud feminists who aspire to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2020 haven't said much about how U.S. foreign policy affects women around the world. Maybe they should.

As a Pakistani woman, I cannot vote in the 2020 elections. But as a non-American Muslim feminist who lives in the global south I wonder what impact the election of a female American president might have on women like me. Would a woman in the Oval Office be good for citizens of Muslim-majority countries in South Asia and the Middle East?

Feminism and women’s rights are dominant issues in the current American political discourse, with four of the female candidates for the Democratic party’s nomination vowing to fight back against the Trump administration’s attempts to undermine them. Kirsten Gillibrand, reports The New York Times, is placing “women’s equality and opportunity at the center of her policy agenda.” Tulsi Gabbard has a clear position on women’s issues: she is pro-choice, supports programs to help domestic violence victims, advocates equal pay (although she has not signed the Paycheck Fairness Act), and opposes sex trafficking. Elizabeth Warren has a strategy to protect women’s reproductive rights and another one to fix America’s failing child care system. Kamala Harris backs the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment and supports pro-choice legislation; and as a black American woman, she represents the rights of women of color, who face discrimination based on both race and gender.

American government policy has profound implications for women all over the world. For example, Trump’s decision to reinstate the Reagan-era Global Gag Rule has defunded aid programs that counsel poor women on reproductive health or provide abortions. His decision to cut funding to the UN Population Fund means that women in war zones, refugee camps, and disaster-hit areas no longer have access to free contraception.

Precedents set by women who held powerful positions in Democratic administrations are not necessarily promising. Both Madeleine Albright, appointed the first female secretary of state by Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton, who served as Barak Obama’s secretary of state, implemented policies that had a profoundly negative impact on the lives of millions of Muslim women in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Libya. The wars and conflicts that Albright and Clinton supported undermined the health and wellbeing of millions of women and their children. Both Clinton and Albright whitewashed their policies with the phrase “humanitarian war,” while one of the widely heard justifications for the U.S. military invasion of Afghanistan was to claim that it was “a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”

But war does not improve the lives of female civilians — particularly not in socially conservative societies. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “gender-based inequity is usually exacerbated during situations of extreme violence such as armed conflict." This is certainly true in Afghanistan. The U.S. has been fighting its longest war there since 2001, with female civilians paying the highest prices in both mortality and human rights. “The legacy of war is killing our freedom,” says Jameela Naseri, a lawyer with the NGO Medica Afghanistan, in a 2018 article for Time. According to data cited by the reporter, Afghanistan is still ranked the worst country in the world to be a woman: 90% of Afghan women have experienced domestic abuse, while 87% are illiterate.

In Iraq and Syria, women and children have suffered the most from the recent and ongoing wars. The power vacuum left in Iraq following the U.S.-led military intervention was filled by ISIS, which made atrocities against women an everyday occurrence. Women who managed to escape from ISIS-held territory were often destitute and had to sell sexual favors for food; they suffered from malnutrition because men controlled food distribution in war-ravaged areas; and cultural strictures kept them from accessing health services or going to school during war.

As a U.S. senator, Hillary Clinton voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2002. Madeleine Albright infamously told journalist Leslie Stahl, during a 1996 interview for 60 Minutes, that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children as a consequence of U.S. sanctions were “worth it.” When she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton authorized nearly 300 drone attacks in Pakistan, which had a direct effect on the safety and security of millions of girls and women in the northwestern region, already traumatized by the reign of the Taliban.

A female president could correct these poor precedents by championing the cause of women’s rights in countries afflicted by war, political instability, or regressive societal and cultural codes that result in massive discrimination against women. This could be good news for many Muslim women, who are struggling mightily for emancipation, empowerment, and opportunities in their own countries. The coming years will probably be critical for Muslim women: they are finding their voice, and their struggle is gaining critical mass and support from Egypt to Indonesia.

If a woman were elected president in 2020, would she adopt the "feminist foreign policy" that Margot Wallstrom, Sweden's foreign minister, tried to promote in 2015? Probably not. Wallstrom lost her job in part because of the diplomatic rows her stance provoked with Saudi Arabia and her position on Israel vis-a-vis Palestine. Clinton made no such mistakes during her stint as Secretary of State; she maintained a strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia, even as she maintained that women's rights were of utmost importance to her.

Many Americans associate pacifism with weakness, and no woman who aspires to the presidency can afford to be perceived as weak. A hawkish foreign policy combined with a warm and caring outlook for America might be the winning combination for a female President.

How are these four female candidates taking this dynamic on board their campaigns?

Tulsi Gabbard opposes Trump’s hawkish policy on Iran and advocates ending the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, but she has also met with Bashar al-Assad, who is largely responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians. Elizabeth Warren advocates progressive domestic policies, but she has voted in favor of hawkish foreign policy initiatives such as a 2017 bill to impose sanctions on Iran. Kamala Harris has voted against resolutions condemning Israel for destroying Palestinian villages or using lethal force in Gaza, although the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory under Israeli rule is crushing the lives of Palestinian women and girls.

A female president who campaigned as a feminist would have to reconcile her commitment to the advancement of women's rights around the world with the well-established relationships between the United States and Middle Eastern countries that oppress women. I see nothing yet in any of the female candidate’s foreign policy record or platform that indicates an interest in improving conditions for women in Middle Eastern countries that suffer from poverty, war, and repressive dictatorships.

The women who aspire to be president of the United States must recognize that American foreign policy decisions made by her predecessors have created terrible hardship for millions of women. They must be aware of the disproportionately high cost of war to women and children, and consider how to reverse this trend. For example, they could make the landmark UN Resolution 1325 on  Women, Peace, and Security part of U.S. foreign policy. Or they could employ gender experts with on-the-ground experience in Afghan women's rights  to formulate effective programs that will help women regain their ground after decades of war.

A female president who aspires to undo the damage wrought by U.S. foreign policy on Muslim women globally will face significant challenges. But if she makes that effort, she could become the champion of women that the world so badly needs right now.

 
    [post_title] => Would a female president be a feminist for the world, or only for America?
    [post_excerpt] => A female president could champion the cause of women’s rights in countries afflicted by war, political instability, or regressive societal and cultural codes that result in massive discrimination against women. This could be good news for many Muslim women, who are struggling mightily for emancipation, empowerment, and opportunities in their own countries. 
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => if-a-women-were-president-would-she-be-a-feminist-for-all-or-only-for-americans
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=1210
    [menu_order] => 314
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

Would a female president be a feminist for the world, or only for America?

by Bina Shah

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 826
    [post_author] => 5
    [post_date] => 2019-04-11 18:53:26
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-04-11 18:53:26
    [post_content] => While the #metoo movement has led to a reconsideration of how masculinity functions in our society, it’s also important to be aware of when the movement acts to constrain conversations about modern feminism, and how to correct this problem.

Men convicted of gender-based crimes in El Salvador are required to enter a program on masculinity. The program seeks to correct the learned behaviors associated with a culture of toxic masculinity and has produced some promising results. Read more.

At Brown University, a program called called Masculinity 101 hosts discussion groups on what masculinity means, relationship dynamics, empathy with others, and male privilege. Other programs at colleges and universities have tried similar or related initiatives with mixed success. Learn more.

Students in a solutions journalism course at the University of Oregon reported on #MeToo initiatives on and off their campuses, asking tough questions about what works and why, and what doesn’t. It’s thoughtful work on an important subject. Read their stories here.

Journalist Sady Doyle tweeted an interesting thread this week, in which she posits that issues once classified as purely “feminist” are now labeled "#MeToo" issues. Doyle's argument mirrors the thesis that David Klion advances in an article for ANI, in which he points out that #MeToo makes both men and women of the ruling class nervous because it is essentially a labor movement, with women demanding the same salaries and opportunities currently available to their male peers. Click on the tweet embedded below to read the entire thread. 

https://twitter.com/sadydoyle/status/1114289946439897093

And then there’s this: what will history will say about the fact that the first, loudest, and best-funded films about the #MeToo moment all made by men? Read about that here.
    [post_title] => Stage two of #metoo: the pros, the cons & the consequences
    [post_excerpt] => 				Taking a look at how the movement has affected the expression of masculinity and where it will go from here.		
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => stage-two-of-metoo-the-pros-the-cons-the-consequences
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
https://conversationalist.org/2019/02/14/why-metoo-makes-the-ruling-class-nervous/
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:03
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:03
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=826
    [menu_order] => 341
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

Stage two of #metoo: the pros, the cons & the consequences

by Jessica McKenzie

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 730
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2019-03-15 16:32:04
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-03-15 16:32:04
    [post_content] => Thousands of Pakistani women took to the streets of cities across the country to demand gender equality. 

On March 8 thousands of women took to the streets of Pakistan's cities to join the Aurat March, or Women’s March, and demand their rights. The atmosphere was exuberant and hopeful, and the march felt as though it were an announcement: a new generation of homegrown feminists had come of age. In their battle for gender equality, however, Pakistani women face some heavy and unique socio-political challenges. 

The demands voiced by the women who assembled in urban areas across Pakistan might sound anachronistic or quaint to Western feminists. In addition to calling for an end to violence toward women, they chanted and carried signs for a living wage for female workers, for increased political participation — and the right to move freely in public spaces. 

In Pakistan, the march’s detractors claimed that it was copied from the Women’s March that took place in the United States in January 2017. Given the very tangible risks Pakistani feminists face, this dismissive attitude is at best ignorant. The women who marched in the United States did not fear physical violence or social condemnation. And the women who marched in Pakistan were inspired not by foreign activists, but by homegrown feminist icons.

The Aurat March is only the latest iteration of a complex feminist movement Pakistan, which was recently declared the sixth most dangerous country in the world for women.

The power of the patriarchy

Pakistani feminists seek to raise awareness among their female peers about their basic rights. Women have the right, for example, to safety and security; to freedom from gender-based discrimination and from sexual harassment. They have the right to equal career opportunities, to schooling and healthcare. Women in Pakistan are struggling against decades, if not centuries, of strict gender roles defined by one of the harshest patriarchies in the world. 

That patriarchy implements strict control over all areas of girls’ and women’s lives. It enacts violence on women’s bodies, using a strict interpretation of Islam as justification for this misogyny. Pakistan’s legal system perpetuates this. While pro-women laws have been passed by the government,  the police do not enforce them and the legal system rarely prosecutes them. 

Pakistani feminists also face accusations that feminism is a movement of the privileged, or the Western-educated; that by fighting for women’s rights they are undermining Islam, which they claim already gives women their rights in the context of religious law. 

In conservative Pakistan, all revolutionaries are accused of immorality and obscenity, and of causing social upheaval and corruption. But the backlash against the feminist movement is even more vindictive than usual. It is colored by misogynist abuse and condescending dismissal that comes from even the most educated men and women — because they are heavily invested in the patriarchal structure of the country, which is the source of their privilege.

Accusations of foreign influence

Some of the suspicions toward the Pakistani feminist movement comes from the fact that Western feminists have, particularly since 9/11, attempted to impose their particular expression of feminism in non-Western parts of the world, such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, often in conjunction with foreign military interventions. Now, with the rise of global and intersectional feminism, “white feminism” is under strong criticism for its inability to place the voices of those non-Western women above its own agenda.

But this criticism ignores the fact that there is a genuine home-grown feminism in all these non-western countries. It is led by local women who express their own needs and desires, form their own agendas, and fight their own battles.  

Pakistani feminists have refuted accusations that feminism is a Western-imposed movement, or that it is secular (i.e., un-Islamic), by placing the struggle in the context of Pakistan’s social and political issues, and by addressing the immediate needs and concerns of Pakistani women. 

Feminists in Pakistan have coined the Urdu word behenchara, or sisterhood, to enact a feminist takeover of the word bhaichara, or fraternity.  They have also placed an inclusive, intersectional ethos at the center of the movement to bring together Pakistan’s diverse groups under the banner of yakhjeti, or unity. 

Raising a grassroots movement

On March 8 Pakistani women gathered in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, just as they did in 2018. Following weeks of project-building, intense campaigning, door-to-door awareness-raising, and clear and urgent communication of their goals, they marched through public spaces. They made sure to express their message in a host of local languages, in order to make it accessible to as broad as possible a swathe of Pakistani society. They framed the struggle for women’s liberation as one that is inherently linked with the liberation of all oppressed groups and minorities.

Last year, 5,000 women from all sections of society marched. They attracted attention from the media, both local and international, and starting a dynamic conversation on social media, in classrooms, and on television, about what feminism is and why it is necessary in Pakistan. This year the turnout was even bigger, as women across ethnic groups and religious sects, socioeconomic groups and gender identities, turned out to hear inspirational speeches from women leaders and representatives, to sing and dance and to take over the streets. In Pakistan, both dancing and taking control of public space are considered immoral behavior for women.

Pakistani feminists don’t need white saviors

The march was not limited to the educated, urban elite. The women of Sindhiani Tehreek, the rural Sindhi Women’s Movement, came to Karachi from Hyderabad and the village Jungshahi on the coast of Sindh. Women from the Hindu and Christian minority communities attended in Lahore and Karachi. Female health workers and midwives, who provide medical care in the most intimate of women’s spaces and have been identified as a major part of the grassroots feminist movement in Pakistan, took center stage at the march. Women marched in Peshawar, Quetta, Faislabad, Hyderabad, and Chitral too, bringing the numbers to nearly 8,000 across the country. 

Pakistani feminists have never waited for Western feminists to instruct them in how to fight for their rights. Today a younger generation of feminists is building on the work of female activists who struggled against dictatorship in the 1970s. 

The Women’s Action Forum was at the forefront of that struggle against Islamist General Mohammed Zia ul Haq, who controlled Pakistan for a decade beginning in 1978. During that time of dictatorship and martial law, the regime stole many of the rights for which women had long struggled; trying to confine them behind the veil and in the home. 

The brave young women of WAF endured political oppression, social condemnation, and physical violence. In one infamous incident, during their protest on the Lahore Mall against the 1979 Hudood Ordinances — newly introduced laws that criminalized adultery and non-marital sex — police beat them and tried to disperse them with tear gas. 

The Pakistani feminists of 2019 are inspired by those women, who are now feminist icons, and their groundbreaking activism. Metaphorically taking the torch passed on from the previous generation, contemporary feminists formed a new collective last year; it is called Hum Aurtain (We Women —  the title comes from Pakistani poet Kishwar Naheed’s famous poem “We Sinful Women), and it was instrumental in organizing Karachi's Aurat March in 2018. 

A second generation of homegrown feminists

Aurat March organizers made it clear that the march was not foreign-funded, nor funded by NGOs or corporations, and that there were no alliances with any political party. The Pakistani feminist movement is homegrown, inclusive, and intersectional.  They urged men to become allies and join the movement; standing against patriarchal structures, they said, was open to all.

But the Aurat March of 2018 and 2019 did not happen overnight. Feminist groups and collectives like Girls at Dhabas, Aurat Raj, Women on Wheels, Girls on Bikes, and the Lyari Girls Café have been chipping away at those societal strictures for several years now. Thanks to their work, people are starting to challenge restrictive attitudes toward women. 

The work of Pakistani feminists will continue even after the high of the Aurat March 2019 fades away. Pakistani women are exploring female-led initiatives in technology and finance, women’s leadership in sports, academics, media, and the military. They have formed organizations that seek to put women on company boards, on panels, position them as experts in every field. Women in the rural areas area agitating for a living wage, for their work to be recognized as formal labor. 

Most excitingly, all of these components form a feminist discourse that is gaining momentum among young people, women, men, trans, straight, queer. Feminism is rapidly becoming part of the everyday conversation shaping a more progressive Pakistan. 
    [post_title] => Pakistan’s feminist revolution: the second generation
    [post_excerpt] => Pakistani feminists have never waited for Western feminists to instruct them in how to fight for their rights. Today a younger generation of feminists is building on the work of female activists who struggled against dictatorship in the 1970s.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => pakistans-feminist-revolution-the-second-generation
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:03
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:03
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=730
    [menu_order] => 348
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)
Poster for Aurat March 2018

Pakistan’s feminist revolution: the second generation

by Bina Shah

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 698
    [post_author] => 5
    [post_date] => 2019-03-07 15:50:25
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-03-07 15:50:25
    [post_content] => Many of the stories in our roundup this week are about silver linings: The activist arrests that fortified a movement; a bottom-up small-dollar revolution in the absence of campaign finance reforms; from the ashes of local newspapers and shrinking media empires, an opportunity to remake the news by learning from the mistakes of the past. We hope these stories inspire you to look for the best-case scenario in any setback, and to find the opportunity to grow and change for the better.

    
 	
  • The Chinese government thought that they could nip a feminist protest in the bud by arresting five activists planning to hand out anti-sexual harassment stickers on International Women’s Day in 2015—but instead their crackdown turned the women into heroes, and laid the foundation for a growing feminist movement. On a recent episode of The Current, author Leta Hong Fincher discussed a new book she wrote on the subject. Listen here.
    • 
 	
  • South Jersey non-profit Distributing Dignity provides women in need with free, new bras and other goods that often go overlooked, but are essential to any woman’s well-being and dignity. Read the story at The Philadelphia Citizen.
    • 
 	
  • According to a new study published by the Aspen Institute, schoolchildren who study in an environment with strong, secure relationships grow up to become empathetic and collaborative adults. Read about the education reform that appeals to conservatives and progressives alike in Governing magazine.
    • 
 	
  • The industry working to improve global access to clean water, food, and education, relies too heavily on jargon that obscures more than it explains—and usually excludes the very people NGOs are trying to help. Simpler, more accessible language does not necessarily mean simpler, less impactful interventions. Read the op-ed in Bright Magazine.
    • 
 	
  • Big money distorts our democracy in favor of those with the deepest pockets, but in the absence of campaign finance reform, politicians can make small-donor contributions a cornerstone of their for-the-people platforms. Read the op-ed in The American Prospect.
    • 
 	
  • Defying telecoms and internet service providers, cities across the country are taking steps to create municipal broadband utilities to help close the digital divide in our country. Learn more on Smart Cities Dive.
    • 
 	
  • Although the steady drumbeat of layoffs at newspapers and media companies across the country is devastating for the people who work in the industry, one optimistic way of looking at the wreckage is to see an opportunity to remake digital news and local media, learning from the mistakes of the past. Read the op-ed in Wired.
    • 
 	
  • Finally, a start-up seeks to make disposable coffee cups a thing of the past with its reusable coffee mugs on-demand service. Sierra Magazine has the story.
    • 


Jessica McKenzie is a freelance journalist in Brooklyn, NY. Previously, she was the managing editor of the civic technology news site Civicist and interned at The Nation magazine. You can follow her on Twitter @jessimckenzi.
    [post_title] => Setbacks and silver linings
    [post_excerpt] => 						
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => setbacks-and-silver-linings
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:31
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:31
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=698
    [menu_order] => 351
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

Setbacks and silver linings

by Jessica McKenzie

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 663
    [post_author] => 5
    [post_date] => 2019-02-28 18:16:23
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-02-28 18:16:23
    [post_content] => Small changes can have big impacts: Style guides can help journalists be more accurate and precise about conflicts around the world. Cutting through red tape in bureaucratic processes can expand access to progressive programs without passing new laws. Taking low-level offenders to treatment instead of jail can change the trajectory of a life.

Then again, big changes—like Yazidi women creating a women-only community to rebuild and heal after genocide—can have big impacts, too. This is our roundup of stories about making changes of all sizes for the better.

    
 	
  • The cost of living is skyrocketing around the country, and wages have failed to keep pace. Paltry wage increases won by labor unions across the country mean little when those dollars don’t go as far as they once did. That is why unions should make affordable housing an organizing priority. Read The American Prospect op-ed. 
    • 



    
 	
  • Journalism shapes the way we understand the world, and accuracy and precision matter. Words like "ethnic"—as in "ethnic tension"—can obscure and mystify what's really going on in conflicts around the world, so the Global Press Journal banned the word in its style guide. Learn more at Neiman Reports.
    • 



    
 	
  • NGOs are getting better at admitting to failure—making the industry more transparent and encouraging open and honest conversations. For decades, only successes were rewarded by the funders and supporters of NGOs, and failures have been carefully hidden or disguised—making it difficult to create open channels for discussion about what works and what doesn’t. Bright Magazine has the story.
    • 



    
 	
  • Displaced Yazidi women who escaped ISIS violence are building a women-only commune in north-eastern Syria, free from "patriarchy and capitalism.” Read The Guardian report.
    • 



    
 	
  • Over-policing is a problem in many U.S. cities, but a new program in Albuquerque allows police officers to take low-level offenders to substance abuse treatment, helping individuals avoid arrest and a criminal record, The Albuquerque Journal reports.
    • 



    
 	
  • The Affordable Care Act was supposed to make mental health services available to all, but fell short of the promise. Some cities, including Denver and Seattle, are stepping up and raising taxes to fill that gap. Governing magazine has the details.
    • 



    
 	
  • When conservative American lawmakers are unable to legislate services like Medicaid or SNAP out of existence, they throw up bureaucratic roadblocks in front of people who need to access those services. In addition to proposing new laws, a progressive agenda should push for reversals of those roadblocks, making it easier for people to access the benefits for which they qualify. Read the op-ed in The American Prospect.
    • 


Jessica McKenzie is a freelance journalist in Brooklyn, NY. Previously, she was the managing editor of the civic technology news site Civicist and interned at The Nation magazine. You can follow her on Twitter @jessimckenzi.


    [post_title] => Acknowledging failures and errors is the first step forward
    [post_excerpt] => 						
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => acknowledging-failures-and-errors-is-the-first-step-forward
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=663
    [menu_order] => 353
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

Acknowledging failures and errors is the first step forward

by Jessica McKenzie

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 646
    [post_author] => 7
    [post_date] => 2019-02-22 14:30:42
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-02-22 14:30:42
    [post_content] => The MeToo movement inspired a much-needed conversation about the treatment of women at the hands of powerful men. For the past year and half, those with “an upper hand” have learned it’s best to keep both hands to themselves. Society is finally beginning to internalize the understanding that women are not mere sexual objects. 

But while that same society has cautioned men about their behavior, it has done little to widen their perspectives about who women are – and can be: experts. 

We are still far behind in acknowledging and learning from the knowledge and contributions of women who are leading experts in a wide range of professional fields. This is especially true in science, technology, finance, law, and national security. “Expertise” in these fields is still one-dimensional and dominated by men. Given the enormous challenges we face today – from climate change to extremism and pandemics to inequality, it is imperative that we graduate from peering at the world through a peephole and instead look at it through a much wider frame.

In 2018 my organization, Foreign Policy Interrupted (FPI), released a study that looked at foreign policy op-eds across three one-year periods, in four major U.S. newspapers. The op-eds we examined were on a broad variety of topics that included global affairs, national security, war, development, human rights, global trade and commerce, and bilateral and multilateral issues. We found that over a 20-year period, from 1996-2016, women authored only 15 percent of all the op-eds published in those four newspapers. 

Breaking the all-male habit

“Women don’t pitch,” is the response commonly heard from editors. Often they will add that “women lack confidence.” In this way they place the blame on women, rather than acknowledging a fact of which all women are aware: that the majority of institutions, such as government, finance, and media, were and still are man-made and male-dominated. The same is true for the professional and social networks from which those experts are selected.

Women have been struggling for decades just to break into those institutions and networks — never mind actually rise in the ranks and become influencers. It is still the case that most editors, producers, and reporters are men, as a study published this week shows, and men are unlikely to seek out female experts. The result is that the public does not hear from leading experts who could bring real insight to pressing issues.

In an article I co-authored last August for the Columbia Journalism Review, I note that journalists tend to return to the same sources because they are “...driven by the pressure to produce ever more content with ever fewer resources.” When breaking news hits, journalists, editors, and producers are under tremendous deadline pressure, and so they do not have the time or inclination to research and talk to real experts. Instead, they go directly to the people working on and influencing an issue. If it’s North Korea, the media is knocking at the National Security Council and Defense Department. If it’s the Amazon headquarters deal in New York City, the media calls up contacts in the tech industry. If it’s a drop in the NASDAQ, the media rushes to Wall Street bankers and investors. 

In each case, men occupy the top spots – which means, of course, that the reporting on these stories is dominated by opinions expressed by men. These men are presented as the “experts,” but in fact they are the kingmakers. They drive the narrative – not to share understanding, but to justify their own positions and decisions.

The perils of quick 'n easy information

This is a dangerous state of affairs. The public is led to believe that their media platforms present them with the best information, when in fact they are mostly presenting them with information that happens to be the easiest and quickest to obtain. The troubling result is an opinionated public that believes it is well-informed, when it is actually being kept in the dark.

Because female expertise has for so long been ignored or minimized, women who pitch opinion pieces to media outlets are often held to a different, harsher standard than a man. When, for example, Beatrice Fihn, the director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, pitched a piece about her work on disarmament in the fall of 2017, editors turned it down on the grounds that it was “too idealistic” or not “hard hitting.” Several months later Ms. Fihn accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of her organization. 

Perhaps it is, indeed, “idealistic” to campaign for the abolishment of nuclear weapons. But that campaign represents an important point of view that adds another dimension to a consequential topic — specifically, the fate of humanity. The only way we are going to hear about these added dimensions is by reaching beyond the status quo and tapping into different experiences and backgrounds. That is true not only for women, but also for people of color. 

The consequences of ignoring women and other diverse voices are far reaching. Not only are we presented with an incomplete picture but, even more gravely, we are overlooking the people who have the knowledge and skills to help us all reach comprehensive solutions to serious problems. When women participate in peace talks, for example, agreements are 64 percent less likely to fail. When women play a role in creating a peace process, the resulting agreement is 35 percent more likely to last at least 15 years. 

How to do better

A number of journalists have made an effort to seek out alternative voices. Ed Young from The Atlantic has talked about the efforts he has put in to diversify his sources, doing extra work to find women in science. A number of other journalists have contacted me about female voices in foreign policy, namely from NPR, and Australia’s ABC. Bloomberg has also reached out. Time, CNN, and The New Republic have been champions — in each case, because female editors have taken the lead. 

Given the enormity of global challenges and the rapid pace at which the world is changing, it is vitally incumbent upon editors to widen their scope. They must consider pitches from voices that diverge from the ones they are accustomed to hearing, and they must be open to different perspectives — even if they sound “idealistic.” When editors make the effort to expand their worldview, they will find numerous resources to support their work.  FPI’s Friday newsletter, SheSource,  Women Also Know Stuff, and Sourcelist, list female experts in all areas, in multitudes. 

The point is not to reach down and pull women up. Rather, it is to throw off the blinders and reach wide to grasp the abundant and multidimensional expertise that will make the world a better place for all of us.

Elmira Bayrasli is the author of  From The Other Side of The World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places. She is the co-founder and CEO of Foreign Policy Interrupted and teaches at Bard College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
    [post_title] => Media outlets are still not amplifying female experts, and this means we really don't know what's going on in the world
    [post_excerpt] => 				According to a 2018 study that looked at foreign policy op-eds across three one-year periods in four major U.S. newspapers, women authored only 15 percent of all the op-eds published in those four newspapers over a 20-year period.		
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => media-outlets-are-still-not-amplifying-female-experts-and-this-means-we-really-dont-know-whats-going-on-in-the-world
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=646
    [menu_order] => 354
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)

Media outlets are still not amplifying female experts, and this means we really don’t know what’s going on in the world

by Elmira Bayrasli

Sign up for our newsletter