TBTN Photos: You Saw Them Here First

Oh blog, I’ve missed you! Let’s catch up! As you might have guessed by my last post, I’ve spent the last few months helping to organize Take Back the Night here in Calgary, and then the following weeks trying to recover and also move apartments. Phew!

But I’m happy to report the event went well- it was a lower attendance than the last few years, but considering it was pulled together by a grassroots group with no organizational backing what-so-ever, not too shabby! I thought I’d share some photographic evidence of the event.

On the next page: a rare glimpse of Jane Doe in real life, interacting with her habitat.

 

Take Back the Night in Calgary!

Take note:

TAKE BACK THE NIGHT is an annual march and rally to protest violence against women and to mourn the victims involved in these terrible gender-biased crimes. Due to a new by-law making the annual march difficult, this year community organizers have planned a candle-light vigil in place of a march. The vigil will be held at Tomkins Park on 17th Avenue and 8th Street SW on Tuesday, September 22nd at 8pm. Come speak out, read poems, sing, cry, yell or be quietly mindful of the ever-important issue of ending violence against women and girls across the world. Contact Juliet at 403-667-4770 or check out the Facebook event group for more details.

Hope to see some of you there!

 

Dying Bride To Bring Happiness to My Complicated, Unmarried Life

So I received this email forward from a well-intentioned though completely clueless family member. As my mouse was hovering over the delete button, I decided to take a second look at it, because there are actually some interesting things being said in this email about how we view women, especially young pretty women, in relation to marriage.

So the jist of it is, “Katie” is engaged and dying of cancer but is going ahead and having a gigantic wedding anyway.

The caption underneath reads:

Even in pain and dealing with her organs shutting down, with the help of morphine, Katie took care of every single wedding planning.
Her dress had to be adjusted several times due to Katie’s constant weight loss.

This seemed horrifying to me. The girl is dying and she’s spending her last minutes booking a DJ and going to the tailor? The point is supposed to be that she’s being heroic, but to me this seems like straight-out masochism.

We also find out:

The other couple in this picture are Nick’s parents, very emotional with the wedding and of course to see their son marrying the girl he fell in love when he was an adolescent.

Marrying your childhood sweetheart= Fairytale

And:

Katie died 5 days after her wedding. To see a fragile woman dress as bride with a beautiful smile makes you think… Happiness is always there within reach, no matter how long it lasts…..lets enjoy life and don’t live a complicated life. Life is too short.

There’s a lot going on in that paragraph. Why is seeing this woman, who is in extreme physical and probably emotional pain, smile her way though a wedding reaffirm that happiness is out there? What’s really being said is “Look, if this dying girl can get married you could be happy too if you just live simply.” And to break it down for the girls out there, living simply=getting married.

I should clarify I don’t know if these are real people, and if they are I fully respect Katie’s choice to get married. But I suspect she and her husband might have a problem with her choice being reduced to a lame “live for the day” anecdote.

If this email is being forwarded to women all over the place, I don’t respect the implication that I should spend my life caring about “simple things” like weddings in case I die tomorrow.

And don’t even get me started on the beautiful dying white girl fetish. Would we have seen these pictures if she was bald or non-causcasion? Probably not.

Thoughts?

 

From Eve to Dawn: the Passing of a Feminist

It’s always so tough to hear about the passing of another feminist, like you’ve lost someone you’re connected to as comrades and fellow soldiers. Like you always kind of thought you’d meet up some day and have so much to talk about. Marilyn French was one of those women, a person I always wanted to hear more from and know more about. A real survivor of the second wave battleground. It would have been nice to share battle scars, and have her laugh at how superficial mine were.

I think French is one of those feminists who have been deemed “unsafe”, aka “man haters”. Like Andrea Dworkin her writing had a strident tone and caused people to wring their hands and worry about hurting men’s feelings. And maybe her writing did, I don’t know. But I do know reading The Woman’s Room in university was like stepping through a looking glass. It was like entering a world that was both familiar and strange. It was off-putting and terrifying at times but it was something I needed to read. No woman wants to see the phrase “all men are rapists” or read about someone else’s repressed life, but I think for women particularly of my generation, we need the reminder. We need to remember that it once was-and in many places still is- permissible for a man to rape his wife. We need to remember that only a few decades ago we were held back from pursuing careers and having intellectual lives. We need to see where we’ve been to figure out where we’re going.

The world will miss you, Marilyn.

 

Pole-Dancing at the Gym: Disturbing, Fun, or Somehow Both?

So the time has come to voice my comfortably anonymous and unpopular opinion: I have a huge problem with strippercise classes. I’m know a lot of women enjoy them, but having done research in the field of sex work and knowing a bit about the sex trade in North America I find the idea of paying someone to teach me to strip for fun uncomfortable. I’m told it’s great exercise, but so is kick-boxing and yoga. Why do we need to play at being sex objects to get a good work-out? I know it’s also got the “sexually empowering” thing going for it which causes me much worry, because as far as I can tell there’s nothing all that sexual happening for the stripper- unless that pole vibrates it’s pretty much just contorting your self into positions that someone else will find sexy. It seems stripercise is “empowering” only if someone else validates your sexuality. And that is the oldest trick in the patriarchy handbook.

What do you folks think? Am I over-reacting or should we put Carmen Electra out of business?

 

The Receptionist’s Lament

I’ve been following Mad Men for the last few seasons and find its portrayal of women working as secretaries during the 1960’s fascinating. While most of these women have professional training and clearly do more actual work than most of the male execs they work for, they were vastly underpaid and had almost zero career mobility. It was expected they were there to find a husband were not permanent employees. My first reaction was to think “thank god these days women can be more than secretaries!” reflecting on the female senior editor I work for and Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl.

After I finished my MA I returned to the real world and realized I had a lot of gaps in my resume, and needed some non-academic work experience. I signed up with a staffing agency, saying I was looking for a job where I could expand my computer skills. The jobs they called me for? Receptionist. Consistently. My boyfriend, who was also looking for a temporary job to support his arts career, had signed up with the same agency and though we had basically the same skill set he was never called for a receptionist position. I think you can see where I’m going with this.

After working several short-term receptionist positions there’s no doubt in my mind the pink collar ghetto hasn’t gone anywhere. I got to know lots of other receptionists who were all in the same boat- while being a receptionist isn’t a horrible job and often pays pretty well, it keeps you in your place. What the companies and (almost always male) executives I worked for wanted was someone to smile and be helpful. Someone to take their phone messages, make their coffee, and put postage on their mail. Someone who could have walked out of an Emily Post guide to etiquette. I learned quickly you weren’t supposed to take interest in the inner workings of the company and never even attempted to find out about other positions in the company.

Why is this hold-over from the corporatization of North America in the 1950’s still with us? Why do we have strict laws against sexual harassment and hiring policies about equal opportunities and yet don’t question the demand for a perky, young girl to sit at the front desk? Is there any escape from the pink ghetto?

 

The “New Face of Feminism” needs to talk

Maybe getting upset by something written by a member of “the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada” is a little like being shocked that Bush endorses McCain. Everyone expects it and clearly there is no point in opening a dialogue here. But Andrea Mrozek’s article needs responding to because what she’s saying needs to be discussed. There are hundreds of amazing feminists in Canada that are nothing like what Mrozek is trying to scare the willing public with, yet we are letting her define us. It’s time to start talking.

So her first point: