Category: Chick Stuff,

Declaring war on Israel’s secular public

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Media and Culture,, Middle East,, Religion,Leave a comment

The current struggle by religious Zionist rabbis against the integration of women in combat units is another sign of a radical process underway that aims to bring religion into every walk of life. 

…The rabbis who object to women serving in tanks as combat soldiers are threatening Israel’s democratic character and seeking to further undermine equality among its citizens.

…The current struggle by religious Zionist rabbis is another sign of the fact that Israeli society is neck-deep in a radical process of religionization, whose purpose is to bring religion into every walk of life. If it isn’t stopped, it will ultimately affect the entire public’s family life, and especially women’s status and freedom.

While religious Zionism fiercely guards its own boundaries, sending its children to separate schools and promoting the establishment of towns and neighborhoods for religious people only, it doesn’t hesitate to insert its long arms into every area of secular life. Orthodox organizations that seek to inculcate Judaism operate in schools via religious girls doing civilian national service; diligent Knesset members try to insert Jewish law ever deeper into Israel’s law books; and the Chief Rabbinate dares to impose ever stricter requirements on the secular community, a large portion of which still (and wrongly) feels that it must turn to the rabbinate for marriage and divorce.

Declaring war on Israel’s secular public – Opinion – Israel News | Haaretz.com

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Moana: The controversy behind Disney’s groundbreaking new princess

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Media and Culture,Leave a comment

Rebecca Hains, author of The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls through the Princess-Obsessed Years, definitely views Moana’s physical appearance as progress. “I think that’s very significant,” she says. “It’s clear to me that Disney has been listening to its critics. Having more heroines on screen who have a more average body type is really important, and it’s a positive sign that Disney is taking some of these parental concerns to heart.”

But conservative writer and talk show host Debbie Schlussel sees a thicker framed Moana as one more example of political correctness gone too far. “I think it tells girls that they don’t have to be fit,” she says. “I think it’s setting up girls for unhealthy lives in the future and also for disappointing romantic lives.”

…Conservative critics like Debbie Schlussel thinks Disney is straying too far from what is “wholesome and good” about the US. “Our society has broken down because Disney has reinforced feminism,” she added.

BBC – Culture – The controversy behind Disney’s groundbreaking new princess

Good Lawd, this Schlussel chick sounds like a nightmare.

Satanic Temple Says Texas’s New Rules on Fetal Burial Violate Their Religious Freedom

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Religion,Leave a comment

In December, Texas will impose new rules requiring all fetal remains to be buried or cremated, a sneaky way to impede abortion access and make patients feel just a little worse, all at the same time. The Satanic Temple, the nation’s best and foremost trolls, declared today that under federal religious freedom laws, their members must be granted immunity from the new rules.

Satanic Temple Says Texas’s New Rules on Fetal Burial Violate Their Religious Freedom

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The U.N. Sent 3 Foreign Women To The U.S. To Assess Gender Equality. They Were Horrified. 

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Domestic Affairs,Leave a comment

The human rights experts concluded that the country falls far behind most others.

…The women’s other recommendations for the U.S. include passing campaign finance reform that would allow more women to be elected into office, because the networks that raise money for political candidates are mostly dominated by men. They also suggested raising the minimum wage, which disproportionately affects women, and passing a federal law to stop the slew of new abortion restrictions in the states that are shutting down women’s health clinics across the South. 

“Religious freedom does not justify discrimination against women, nor does it justify depriving women of their rights to the highest standard of health care,” Raday said.

The U.N. Sent 3 Foreign Women To The U.S. To Assess Gender Equality. They Were Horrified. | The Huffington Post

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Why should women have to pay the price for ‘safety’ on a daily basis? 

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,Leave a comment

The poll listed 10 different strategies women use to try to avoid harassment, from avoiding parks or public transport to taking a chaperone or even failing to attend work, school or college all together. A quarter of the women polled had changed their travel route and 28% had prepared to use an everyday object, such as keys or an umbrella, as a weapon.

What is worse is that society encourages women to do these things. It regularly reinforces the message that it is women’s responsibility to keep themselves safe, not men’s responsibility not to harass or assault them. We see it in newspaper articles that emphasise a rape victim’s clothing or behaviour, implying the attack might never have happened if only she had taken more precautions. We see it in celebrity “warnings” to young women to avoid rape by not drinking, not wearing the wrong thing, not being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because, the assumption goes, rape is a shadowy, inevitable force out there waiting for silly women who walk into its path, not the deliberate act of an individual criminal. We see it in police campaigns that tell women to avoid “becoming a victim of rape” by doing things that are legal, instead of telling men not to become rapists by breaking the law.

Why should women have to pay the price for ‘safety’ on a daily basis? | Life and style | The Guardian

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Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there 

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Media and Culture,Leave a comment

But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine.

There was Joe Biden, with his powerful plainspoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure….

Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there | Thomas Frank | Opinion | The Guardian

OOOOOOoooohhhhhhh,  you would have preferred a career politician who was an old white guy with messy hair and you’ll say anything to justify that viewpoint.

Gotcha.

Don’t call Clinton a weak candidate: it took decades of scheming to beat her 

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Domestic Affairs,, Media and Culture,Leave a comment

And it took a shortsighted campaign of hatred on the left, an almost hysterical rage like nothing I have ever seen before about any public figure. Some uncritically picked up half-truths, outright fictions, and rightwing spin to feed their hate and rejected anything that diluted the purity and focus of that fury, including larger questions about the other candidate and the fate of the Earth. 

…A lot of people seemed to think the Sanders-Clinton primary ended the night Trump was elected. I saw that stuckness from climate activists, anti-racist journalists, civil-rights champions, and others who you might expect would have turned to face the clear and present danger of a Trump presidency. 

…It’s impossible to disconnect the seething, irrational emotionality from misogyny, and the misogyny continues. Since election night, I’ve been hearing too many men of the left go on and on about how Clinton was a weak candidate. I’ve wondered about that word weak, not only because it is so often associated with women, but because what they’re calling her weakness was their refusal to support her. It’s as if they’re saying, “They sent a pink lifeboat and we sent it back, because we wanted a blue lifeboat, and now we are very upset that people are drowning.”

Don’t call Clinton a weak candidate: it took decades of scheming to beat her | US news | The Guardian

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What A 1950s Texas Textbook Can Teach Us About Today’s Textbook Fight

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Education,, Media and Culture,, Race,Leave a comment

On the Mexican-American history textbook:

“One of the fundamental problems with the scholarship of the book is that you have non-historians writing a textbook for history,” said Trinidad Gonzales, a professor of history at South Texas College. “It’s really a polemic masquerading as a textbook, and it’s really trying to argue that Mexican-American culture, including Catholicism, is a fundamental threat to American democracy.”

On seventh-grade Texas history textbook, published in 1954:

“What you have set up here is this mythology. The women who helped these brave men were wives and mothers. They were connected to men through marriage and motherhood. They were not single women. They were not working women. They were not reformers,” [Dr. Nancy Baker Jones of the Ruth Winegarden Foundation for Texas Women’s History] said. “They were the women that were in their socially approved places to the exclusion of many other roles that women have played and contributions that women have made and lives that women have lived.”

This textbook was used by public school students across Texas in the late 1950s and early 1960s, so it helped shape the perceptions and attitudes of people who today would likely be in their ‘60s.

…The textbook acknowledges that slavery at least played a role in the Civil War, but it also treats African-Americans as sub-humans, and again, only defines their history in terms of the convenience of slavery to Anglo, white property owners.

…”That was not just the reigning consensus in a middle school Texas history textbook. That was the reigning consensus in the 1950s in the northern and mid-western dominated college history professoriate. That’s the way college history was written about.” [Benjamin Johnson, an associate professor of history at Loyola University in Chicago]

[Walter Buenger, a professor in the history department at Texas A&M University] agrees. He says academics taught a whole generation to think of African-Americans as “children who were easily misled” after the end of slavery, which he says translates into modern day racism.

What A 1950s Texas Textbook Can Teach Us About Today’s Textbook Fight – Houston Public Media

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British woman arrested in Dubai after reporting rape, group says 

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Middle East,Leave a comment

A British tourist has been arrested in Dubai on charges of extramarital sex after telling police she was raped by a group of British nationals while in the United Arab Emirates, according to a UK-based legal advice group called Detained in Dubai.

British woman arrested in Dubai after reporting rape, group says – CNN.com

Despite the glittery PR campaigns Dubai always sounds like a total shithole whenever it pops up in the news. What the heck do these silly tourists and ex-pats expect? The laws are in the stone ages.

Why misogyny won 

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Domestic Affairs,, Media and Culture,Leave a comment

In the context of Trump, a benevolent sexist might hear the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape and say that he’s horrified because he has a daughter — which suggests that his first instinct is to paternalistically shield his female relatives from harm, rather than to see sexual assault as an objective moral horror no matter who you’re related to.

Meanwhile, a hostile sexist would claim the benevolent sexist is overreacting — that the tape doesn’t actually describe sexual assault, just normal male sexual aggression.

These attitudes might seem diametrically opposed to one another. But they’re actually two sides of the same coin, Peter Glick, professor of psychology and social sciences at Lawrence University, told Vox. People can hold both of these sexist views at the same time, and they very often do.

“It’s how men can wear ‘Trump That Bitch’ T-shirts at a Trump rally, and then go home and say, ‘I love my wife and daughter,’” Glick said.

Trump expresses both hostile and benevolent attitudes toward women all the time. When he likes a woman, he praises her in a patronizing way (usually focusing on her physical beauty). When he doesn’t, he viciously insults her.

Benevolent sexism is the carrot, Glick explained, and hostile sexism is the stick. If you’re a “good” woman who meets expected gender norms — who has warm feminine charms, who maintains strict beauty standards, whose ambitions are focused on home and hearth — you will be rewarded with affection, protection, and praise. But step outside those norms, and you risk being labeled as one of the “bad” girls who are abused and scorned only because they deserve it.

It’s a tidy little cycle. Benevolent sexism is supposed to protect women from hostile sexism, and hostile sexism is supposed to keep women in line with the ideals of benevolent sexism.

But while benevolent sexism may put women on a pedestal, Glick said, it’s a very narrow pedestal that’s easy to fall off of. This is the whole reason that our age-old “Madonna versus whore” dichotomy exists in the first place: If women can be separated into good girls and bad, and only bad girls get punished, it justifies male dominance and absolves men of blame for treating women unfairly.

And it’s why Trump, despite the long list of sexist words and deeds to his name, can insist that “nobody respects women more” than he does — and why some people, including women, actually believe him.

…The basic agreement is that as long as women cater to men’s needs, men will protect and cherish women in return.

…Sexual assault is the ultimate expression of hostile sexism. But the protection racket of benevolent sexism gives women a lot of incentive to either forgive men for it, or blame women.

The alternative — acknowledging that the system is broken, and that virtue can’t protect you from violence — can be too terrible to contemplate.

Why misogyny won – Vox

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Her Loss

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Domestic Affairs,, Media and Culture,Leave a comment

It’s not fair, and I’m so tired, and every woman I know is so tired. I cried because I don’t even know what it feels like to be taken seriously—not fully, not in that whole, unequivocal, confident way that’s native to handshakes between men. I cried because it does things to you to always come second.

Whatever your personal opinion of the Clintons, as politicians or as human beings, that dynamic is real. We, as a culture, do not take women seriously on a profound level. We do not believe women. We do not trust women. We do not like women. I understand that many men cannot see it, and plenty more do not care. I know that many men will read this and laugh, or become defensive, or call me hysterical, or worse, and that’s fine. I am used to it. It doesn’t make me wrong.

Her Loss

Sigh….