Wednesday, December 9, 2009
The Stupak Amendment
The thunderous applause greeting the announcement of the House’s health care reform bill, effectively curtailing women’s access to abortion, drowned out the cries and screams from our nation’s recent past. The cries and screams of everywoman, wretchedly pregnant, with no options but to take matters into her own hands.We don’t talk much about these women today: the single women, poor women, women who already were caring for far too many little ones, women whose boyfriends or husbands would beat them or leave them if they had a baby, women who wanted to leave their boyfriends or husbands, women who wanted to finish their education or hold onto a job, were too young, too immature, too old, had been raped, were victims of incest, or just plain didn’t want to be mothers.But fortunately, there are those who remember.The words of Dr. Edward Keemer of Washington D.C. help us imagine the absolute desperation these women must have felt:
I had treated a woman . . . [who] still had the straightened-out coat hanger hanging from her vagina. Some... died from air embolisms or infections. Over the years I was to encounter hundreds of other women who had resorted to imaginative but deadly methods of self-induced abortion... some would swallow quinine or turpentine. Others would insert a corrosive potassium permanganate tablet into their vaginas... A sixteen-year-old girl... died after douching with a cupful of bleach. During the 1960s, a million women are estimated to have had illegal abortions. Of those who survived, untold numbers became sterile. By one count seven thousand women died from botched abortions in 1966 (compared to three thousand American deaths that year in Vietnam). Hard as it is verify these statistics, what we know is that the deaths and disabilities from illegal abortions fell disproportionately on poor women and women of color.Maybe Bart Stupak and the merry band of 64 Democrats and 176 Republicans who voted for his amendment missed the memo, but the last time I checked abortion was still legal in this country. Now, though thanks to their cynical maneuvering, it will be beyond the reach of millions of women who need it, possibly forcing them to resort to the horrifying options of Dr. Keemer’s patients.According to the National Organization of Women, the Stupak Amendment, if it remains in the final version of health insurance reform, will:
Prevent women receiving tax subsidies from using their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;
Prevent women participating in the public health insurance exchange administered by private insurance companies from using 100 percent of their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;
Prevent low-income women from accessing abortion entirely, in many cases.As Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Herblock commented wryly during the Reagan years, “It’s simple -- if you could afford to have children, you could have an abortion.”What Bart Stupak and Co. want goes way beyond the thirty year old Hyde Amendment, still in place, that forbids federal funds for abortion. There is a chance that the House abortion restrictions will be modified in committee, but I’m not counting on it. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) has already suggested introducing a measure similar to the Stupak Amendment in the Senate Bill, and Harry Reid will have a hard time fighting the anti-abortionists especially since he personally does not support choice.Dark clouds are looming on the horizon for women’s fundamental right to self-determination. By pandering to the hard-lobbying U.S. Catholic Bishops who demanded the elimination of abortion coverage from healthcare reform, we will now have to contend with a newly energized religious intrusion into our policies. The movement to grant fetuses, even eggs, personhood, supported by the religious right, is thriving.Bills have recently been introduced into the state legislatures of Michigan and Tennessee, with the ultimate goal of making abortion murder under the Constitution regardless of the any Supreme Court decision. The Stupak Amendment is another tactic in the increasingly organized and well-financed drive to deprive women of their most fundamental rights.When President Obama first applauded the House bill he not only didn’t express disappointment over the compromise on women’s health care, he didn’t even mention it! Only a day and a half later did he issue a tepid statement about restoring women to the status quo, steadfastly refusing to utter the dreaded a-word.Maybe we’re seeing something many of us have tried to overlook. But it’s hard to forget the speed with which the president eliminated provisions to expand access to affordable family planning, cost effective legislation which would have helped millions of low-income women, from the economic stimulus bill. Or to overlook his use of the term partial-birth abortion in the third presidential debate, a phrase deplored by all who are pro-choice.I’m starting to get the uneasy feeling that the Obama administration, like so many Democrats, considers women’s issues as marginal, even separate from their Progressive agenda. How can they believe they are protecting a woman’s health, while taking away her reproductive freedom?The answer is they don’t.This is only one more example of the ongoing rollback of women’s rights that we have been ignoring at our own peril. It’s time to say enough! We hear a lot these days about being on the right side of history. If we, as a nation really believe that, than how can we return to a history filled with the cries and screams of our foremothers?Women put Obama in office; now we have to call in our chips.
I had treated a woman . . . [who] still had the straightened-out coat hanger hanging from her vagina. Some... died from air embolisms or infections. Over the years I was to encounter hundreds of other women who had resorted to imaginative but deadly methods of self-induced abortion... some would swallow quinine or turpentine. Others would insert a corrosive potassium permanganate tablet into their vaginas... A sixteen-year-old girl... died after douching with a cupful of bleach. During the 1960s, a million women are estimated to have had illegal abortions. Of those who survived, untold numbers became sterile. By one count seven thousand women died from botched abortions in 1966 (compared to three thousand American deaths that year in Vietnam). Hard as it is verify these statistics, what we know is that the deaths and disabilities from illegal abortions fell disproportionately on poor women and women of color.Maybe Bart Stupak and the merry band of 64 Democrats and 176 Republicans who voted for his amendment missed the memo, but the last time I checked abortion was still legal in this country. Now, though thanks to their cynical maneuvering, it will be beyond the reach of millions of women who need it, possibly forcing them to resort to the horrifying options of Dr. Keemer’s patients.According to the National Organization of Women, the Stupak Amendment, if it remains in the final version of health insurance reform, will:
Prevent women receiving tax subsidies from using their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;
Prevent women participating in the public health insurance exchange administered by private insurance companies from using 100 percent of their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;
Prevent low-income women from accessing abortion entirely, in many cases.As Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Herblock commented wryly during the Reagan years, “It’s simple -- if you could afford to have children, you could have an abortion.”What Bart Stupak and Co. want goes way beyond the thirty year old Hyde Amendment, still in place, that forbids federal funds for abortion. There is a chance that the House abortion restrictions will be modified in committee, but I’m not counting on it. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) has already suggested introducing a measure similar to the Stupak Amendment in the Senate Bill, and Harry Reid will have a hard time fighting the anti-abortionists especially since he personally does not support choice.Dark clouds are looming on the horizon for women’s fundamental right to self-determination. By pandering to the hard-lobbying U.S. Catholic Bishops who demanded the elimination of abortion coverage from healthcare reform, we will now have to contend with a newly energized religious intrusion into our policies. The movement to grant fetuses, even eggs, personhood, supported by the religious right, is thriving.Bills have recently been introduced into the state legislatures of Michigan and Tennessee, with the ultimate goal of making abortion murder under the Constitution regardless of the any Supreme Court decision. The Stupak Amendment is another tactic in the increasingly organized and well-financed drive to deprive women of their most fundamental rights.When President Obama first applauded the House bill he not only didn’t express disappointment over the compromise on women’s health care, he didn’t even mention it! Only a day and a half later did he issue a tepid statement about restoring women to the status quo, steadfastly refusing to utter the dreaded a-word.Maybe we’re seeing something many of us have tried to overlook. But it’s hard to forget the speed with which the president eliminated provisions to expand access to affordable family planning, cost effective legislation which would have helped millions of low-income women, from the economic stimulus bill. Or to overlook his use of the term partial-birth abortion in the third presidential debate, a phrase deplored by all who are pro-choice.I’m starting to get the uneasy feeling that the Obama administration, like so many Democrats, considers women’s issues as marginal, even separate from their Progressive agenda. How can they believe they are protecting a woman’s health, while taking away her reproductive freedom?The answer is they don’t.This is only one more example of the ongoing rollback of women’s rights that we have been ignoring at our own peril. It’s time to say enough! We hear a lot these days about being on the right side of history. If we, as a nation really believe that, than how can we return to a history filled with the cries and screams of our foremothers?Women put Obama in office; now we have to call in our chips.
Rallying For Women's rights
Rallying for Women's Rights
Rallying for Women's Rights
The thunderous applause greeting the recent announcement of the House's healthcare reform bill, effectively curtailing women's access to abortion, drowned out the cries and screams from our nation's recent past. The cries and screams of everywoman, wretchedly pregnant, with no options but to take matters into her own hands. We don't talk much about these women today: the single women, poor women, women who already were caring for far too many little ones, women whose boyfriends or husbands would beat them or leave them if they had a baby, women who wanted to leave their boyfriends or husbands, women who wanted to finish their education or hold onto a job, were too young, too immature, too old, had been raped, were victims of incest, or just plain didn't want to be mothers.But fortunately, there are those who remember.
The words of Dr. Edward Keemer of Washington D.C. help us imagine the absolute desperation these women must have felt:
I had treated a woman . . . [who] still had the straightened-out coat hanger hanging from her vagina. Some . . . died from air embolisms or infections. Over the years I was to encounter hundreds of other women who had resorted to imaginative but deadly methods of self-induced abortion . . . some would swallow quinine or turpentine. Others would insert a corrosive potassium permanganate tablet into their vaginas. . . . A sixteen-year-old girl . . . died after douching with a cupful of bleach.
During the 1960s, a million women are estimated to have had illegal abortions. Of those who survived, untold numbers became sterile. By one count seven thousand women died from botched abortions in 1966 (compared to three thousand American deaths that year in Vietnam). Hard as it is verify these statistics, what we know is that the deaths and disabilities from illegal abortions fell disproportionately on poor women and women of color.
Maybe Bart Stupak and the merry band of 64 Democrats and 176 Republicans who voted for his amendment missed the memo, but the last time I checked abortion was still legal in this country. Now, though thanks to their cynical maneuvering, it will be beyond the reach of millions of women who need it, possibly forcing them to resort to the horrifying options of Dr. Keemer's patients.
According to the National Organization of Women, the Stupak Amendment, if it remains in the final version of health insurance reform, will:? Prevent women receiving tax subsidies from using their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;? Prevent women participating in the public health insurance exchange administered by private insurance companies from using 100 percent of their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;? Prevent low-income women from accessing abortion entirely, in many cases.
As Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Herblock commented wryly during the Reagan years, "It's simple--if you could afford to have children, you could have an abortion."
What Bart Stupak and Co. want goes way beyond the thirty year old Hyde Amendment, still in place, that forbids federal funds for abortion. There is a chance that the House abortion restrictions will be modified or eliminated in the final bill, but I'm not counting on it. The anti-choice Senate crowd has been very vocal about want they want, and Harry Reid, who personally does not support choice, is going to have to make concessions to them.
Dark clouds are looming on the horizon for women's fundamental right to self-determination. By pandering to the hard-lobbying U.S. Catholic Bishops who demanded the elimination of abortion coverage from healthcare reform, we will now have to contend with a newly energized religious intrusion into our policies. The movement to grant fetuses, even eggs, personhood, supported by the religious right, is thriving. Bills have recently been introduced into the state legislatures of Michigan and Tennessee, with the ultimate goal of making abortion murder under the Constitution regardless of the any Supreme Court decision. The Stupak Amendment is another tactic in the increasingly organized and well-financed drive to deprive women of their most fundamental rights.
When President Obama, first applauded the House bill he not only didn't express disappointment over the compromise on women's healthcare, he didn't even mention it! Only a day and a half later did he issue a tepid statement about restoring women to the status quo, steadfastly refusing to utter the dreaded a-word.
Maybe we're seeing something many of us have tried to overlook. But it's hard to forget the speed with which the president eliminated provisions to expand access to affordable family planning, cost effective legislation which would have helped millions of low-income women, from the economic stimulus bill. Or to overlook his use of the term partial-birth abortion in the third presidential debate, a phrase deplored by all who are pro-choice.
I'm starting to get the uneasy feeling that the Obama administration, like so many Democrats, considers women's issues as marginal, even separate from their Progressive agenda. How can they believe they are protecting a woman's health, while taking away her reproductive freedom?
The answer is they don't.
This is only one more example of the ongoing rollback of women's rights that we have been ignoring at our own peril. We hear a lot these days about being on the right side of history. If we, as a nation really believe that, than how can we return to a history filled with the cries and screams of our foremothers? Pro-choice women and men from all over the country are gathering in Washington on December 3rd to rally against keeping the Stupak Amendment in the final bill.
Women put Obama in office it's time to call in our chips. Barbara J. Berg is the author of Sexism in America: Alive, Well and Ruining Our Future (Chicago Review Press, Sept, 2009)
Rallying for Women's Rights
The thunderous applause greeting the recent announcement of the House's healthcare reform bill, effectively curtailing women's access to abortion, drowned out the cries and screams from our nation's recent past. The cries and screams of everywoman, wretchedly pregnant, with no options but to take matters into her own hands. We don't talk much about these women today: the single women, poor women, women who already were caring for far too many little ones, women whose boyfriends or husbands would beat them or leave them if they had a baby, women who wanted to leave their boyfriends or husbands, women who wanted to finish their education or hold onto a job, were too young, too immature, too old, had been raped, were victims of incest, or just plain didn't want to be mothers.But fortunately, there are those who remember.
The words of Dr. Edward Keemer of Washington D.C. help us imagine the absolute desperation these women must have felt:
I had treated a woman . . . [who] still had the straightened-out coat hanger hanging from her vagina. Some . . . died from air embolisms or infections. Over the years I was to encounter hundreds of other women who had resorted to imaginative but deadly methods of self-induced abortion . . . some would swallow quinine or turpentine. Others would insert a corrosive potassium permanganate tablet into their vaginas. . . . A sixteen-year-old girl . . . died after douching with a cupful of bleach.
During the 1960s, a million women are estimated to have had illegal abortions. Of those who survived, untold numbers became sterile. By one count seven thousand women died from botched abortions in 1966 (compared to three thousand American deaths that year in Vietnam). Hard as it is verify these statistics, what we know is that the deaths and disabilities from illegal abortions fell disproportionately on poor women and women of color.
Maybe Bart Stupak and the merry band of 64 Democrats and 176 Republicans who voted for his amendment missed the memo, but the last time I checked abortion was still legal in this country. Now, though thanks to their cynical maneuvering, it will be beyond the reach of millions of women who need it, possibly forcing them to resort to the horrifying options of Dr. Keemer's patients.
According to the National Organization of Women, the Stupak Amendment, if it remains in the final version of health insurance reform, will:? Prevent women receiving tax subsidies from using their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;? Prevent women participating in the public health insurance exchange administered by private insurance companies from using 100 percent of their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;? Prevent low-income women from accessing abortion entirely, in many cases.
As Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Herblock commented wryly during the Reagan years, "It's simple--if you could afford to have children, you could have an abortion."
What Bart Stupak and Co. want goes way beyond the thirty year old Hyde Amendment, still in place, that forbids federal funds for abortion. There is a chance that the House abortion restrictions will be modified or eliminated in the final bill, but I'm not counting on it. The anti-choice Senate crowd has been very vocal about want they want, and Harry Reid, who personally does not support choice, is going to have to make concessions to them.
Dark clouds are looming on the horizon for women's fundamental right to self-determination. By pandering to the hard-lobbying U.S. Catholic Bishops who demanded the elimination of abortion coverage from healthcare reform, we will now have to contend with a newly energized religious intrusion into our policies. The movement to grant fetuses, even eggs, personhood, supported by the religious right, is thriving. Bills have recently been introduced into the state legislatures of Michigan and Tennessee, with the ultimate goal of making abortion murder under the Constitution regardless of the any Supreme Court decision. The Stupak Amendment is another tactic in the increasingly organized and well-financed drive to deprive women of their most fundamental rights.
When President Obama, first applauded the House bill he not only didn't express disappointment over the compromise on women's healthcare, he didn't even mention it! Only a day and a half later did he issue a tepid statement about restoring women to the status quo, steadfastly refusing to utter the dreaded a-word.
Maybe we're seeing something many of us have tried to overlook. But it's hard to forget the speed with which the president eliminated provisions to expand access to affordable family planning, cost effective legislation which would have helped millions of low-income women, from the economic stimulus bill. Or to overlook his use of the term partial-birth abortion in the third presidential debate, a phrase deplored by all who are pro-choice.
I'm starting to get the uneasy feeling that the Obama administration, like so many Democrats, considers women's issues as marginal, even separate from their Progressive agenda. How can they believe they are protecting a woman's health, while taking away her reproductive freedom?
The answer is they don't.
This is only one more example of the ongoing rollback of women's rights that we have been ignoring at our own peril. We hear a lot these days about being on the right side of history. If we, as a nation really believe that, than how can we return to a history filled with the cries and screams of our foremothers? Pro-choice women and men from all over the country are gathering in Washington on December 3rd to rally against keeping the Stupak Amendment in the final bill.
Women put Obama in office it's time to call in our chips. Barbara J. Berg is the author of Sexism in America: Alive, Well and Ruining Our Future (Chicago Review Press, Sept, 2009)
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Getting Real About Women's Progress
Maybe we’re all suffering from bad-news overload. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for the media’s uncritical embrace of the often erroneous feel-good Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, essentially declaring an end to “the battle of the sexes.”Time magazine, writing about the report, claims, “the argument over where women belong is over.” Try telling that to Andrea Wolff-Yakubovich whose boss fired her from her position as finance director for a Denver-based John Elway AutoNation dealership when she disclosed she was expecting, telling her husband, “She should be barefoot, pregnant and at home.” (Really!)And I seem to remember not too long ago a lot of angry GOP males urging General Stanley McChrystal to put Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi “in her place,” because of her statements about the war in Afghanistan.Notwithstanding all the real gains we’ve seen from the second wave women’s movement of the 1970s, the United States ranks 27th out of a total of 130 countries, behind Cuba and Lithuania, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report of 2008.We are the only industrialized nation that doesn’t offer paid maternity leave. And like Wolff-Yakubovich, hundreds of women, in stark violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, are being fired when they become pregnant. The United States is one of a very few westernized nations to leave day care almost completely to the unregulated private market. And a new study has just disclosed that more than a quarter of our nation’s schoolchildren are unsupervised and alone after the regular school day because of the scarcity of funded after-school programs.Unlike some other 145 countries, the United States doesn’t assure all workers paid sick days for their own illnesses or to care for a sick family member, and women pay hundreds of dollars more than men for identical health insurance overage. Our infant mortality rate is appalling -- 29th in the world -- and although the American Academy of Pediatrics “urges mothers to breastfeed exclusively for six months,” we differ from 107 countries in not protecting a working woman’s right to breastfeed. In our nation’s capital the mortality rate is four times as great for black infants as for white ones.Unfortunately, it’s not just at hedge funds, as Time suggests, where women are facing strong headwinds. At four year colleges across the nation, women make up 50% of instructors and assistant professors, but are only 27% of tenured faculty. They are 50% of managers and professionals and only 2.6% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. The majority of working women in America still work in low-paid service jobs with little flexibility and few benefits. And thanks to the gender pay gap that starts right out of college and continues to grow, a woman working full-time her entire life makes on average $700,000 less than a man.For the first time since 1918 women’s life expectancy is shortening. Women across the nation are dying from treatable chronic diseases. “[In no state] do women enjoy satisfactory health status,” according to the National Women’s Health Report Card issued by the National Women’s Law Center. Women present with different symptoms and respond to different medicines and therapies in a variety of diseases including strokes and heart attacks, but they are still not included in medical clinical trials.Intimate partner assaults on women are soaring, yet everywhere we turn -- from advertising to electronic gaming -- we are bombarded with images of violence against women. We have the highest teen pregnancy rate in the western world and one out of every four adolescent girls has some form of STD.Our reproductive rights are in jeopardy with the far right waging a quietly successful campaign to have fetuses granted personhood on the state level. If that drive succeeds, then Supreme Court or no Supreme Court, abortion will be declared murder under the U.S. Constitution and will be illegal throughout the land.So -- instead of celebrating how far women have come, we should be asking why, after so many years, we still have so far to go.[Barbara J. Berg, Ph.D., is the author of Sexism in America: Alive, Well and Ruining Our Future (Chicago Review Press, 2009).]The Rag Blog
Monday, October 26, 2009
What's Really Scary About Halloween
“I want it, Mommy, puhleeze . . . puhleeze!”
A little girl no older than six was sprawled across the aisle, clinging to a Halloween costume and screaming in a voice high-pitched enough to break glass. Shoppers bunched up around her, my daughter, Ali, and I among them. There were a few irritated murmurs and groans of exasperation.
It was one of those please-let-me-vanish-into-thin-air mothering moments. I could see the effort the mom was making to stay calm, bending over her daughter, reasoning quietly. But everything she did only resulted in more shrieking. “I want it!” “I want it!”
The man next to me covered his ears. Finally the mother, flushing with humiliation, peeled her daughter off the large plastic bag. Now we got to see what all the fuss was about.
I couldn’t believe it. A Naughty Nurse costume!
It was impossible not to stare. The large picture showed a young girl dressed in white fishnet stockings, high heels, and a satiny candy-stripper mini with a matching bustier. One hand was at her thrust-out hip, the other holding a syringe as if it were a sex toy.
I directed my gaze to the bottom row and took in the other costumes--Transylvania Temptress, Frisky French Maid, and Little Miss Handy Candy--all with shiny bright fabrics, lots of sparkles, knee-high boots, plunging necklines, and fluffy boas. How could these be for the six-year-old set? But there they were, and all in easy reach of little hands. A clash of parent-child wills just waiting to happen.
Meanwhile, the situation on the ground was rapidly deteriorating. The little girl was writhing on the floor staging a level-five hissy fit. You could almost see the flashing words in the bubble over her mom’s head: “I’m not a bad mother. Really I’m not.” I watched her expression go from horrified to resigned. With rapid-fire motion, she yanked a fresh Naughty Nurse off the hook and scooped up her daughter. I gave her a sympathetic smile, but she’d already turned her head, anxiously looking for the checkout counter.
Other stores have pretty much the same selection. Pirate Wench, Instant Bunny (complete with the Playboy Bunny bowtie ) Major Flirt ( this year’s contribution to the military) and Little Bo Peep in a corset and lace petticoat. But what’s really scary are the pouty faces and beckoning thrust out hips of preteens ( and younger) modeling these clothes more rightfully belong in the window displays of seedy downtown sex shops..
“I wondered if I’d accidentally wondered into ‘Sluts R Us,’” Rachel Mosteller wrote on Blogging Baby about her search for her children’s Halloween costumes. She hoped her little ones would have no idea about the meaning behind names like Handy Candy--a sentiment widely shared by other moms who’d had similar experiences.
While Halloween for boys hasn’t changed much--the same blood-dripping masks and ghoulish garb--“costumes for girls have traded silly and sweet for skimpy and sexy.” “ It’s a strange time we live in when half the doctors are women, and half the lawyers are women, and all the little girls are prancing around in sexy costumes,” said Albany family therapist Lindy Guttman.
Her comment is right on target. Precisely because of the anxiety over women’s achievements, marketers are pushing marginalizing costumes on our daughters, reinforcing gender stereotypes. Instead of dressing up as a scientist, engineer, teacher or Dora the Explorer girls are parading around as chamber maids in a low-cut bodies and mini skirts. Tarty-tween costumes for Halloween are part of the sexualization of young women and girls—a trend going on for many years..
Unlike healthy sexuality, the sexualization of girls provides a very narrow definition of femaleness with a focus exclusively on appearance. This skewed identity “leads to a host of negative emotional consequences such as shame, anxiety, and even self-disgust,” says a recent report released by the American Psychological Association.
When sexual allure becomes the only path to power and self-worth, the role of achievement, talent, and being a decent person are diminished. Reduced concentration at school, eating disorders, depression, and unsafe and early sex are often the result. The onslaught of sexual images is encouraging a whole generation of girls to think about and treat their bodies as sexual objects, things for others’ use.
No parent wants to be Oscar the Grouch on Halloween and overrule a child’s choice of a costume, but if a group of parents get together and set up boundaries on what is and isn’t acceptable for dress-up, it will be a lot easier to steer your little goblin in the right direction. It’s also a good idea to organize an email blast to manufacturers and tell them why you’re not buying Miss Sexy Sergeant for your fifth grader. Or protest outside a store selling sexy costumes for the younger set and help to bring community-wide attention to issues of sexualizing girls and young women.
Women have a tremendous amount of power, but we have to use it to be effective.
A little girl no older than six was sprawled across the aisle, clinging to a Halloween costume and screaming in a voice high-pitched enough to break glass. Shoppers bunched up around her, my daughter, Ali, and I among them. There were a few irritated murmurs and groans of exasperation.
It was one of those please-let-me-vanish-into-thin-air mothering moments. I could see the effort the mom was making to stay calm, bending over her daughter, reasoning quietly. But everything she did only resulted in more shrieking. “I want it!” “I want it!”
The man next to me covered his ears. Finally the mother, flushing with humiliation, peeled her daughter off the large plastic bag. Now we got to see what all the fuss was about.
I couldn’t believe it. A Naughty Nurse costume!
It was impossible not to stare. The large picture showed a young girl dressed in white fishnet stockings, high heels, and a satiny candy-stripper mini with a matching bustier. One hand was at her thrust-out hip, the other holding a syringe as if it were a sex toy.
I directed my gaze to the bottom row and took in the other costumes--Transylvania Temptress, Frisky French Maid, and Little Miss Handy Candy--all with shiny bright fabrics, lots of sparkles, knee-high boots, plunging necklines, and fluffy boas. How could these be for the six-year-old set? But there they were, and all in easy reach of little hands. A clash of parent-child wills just waiting to happen.
Meanwhile, the situation on the ground was rapidly deteriorating. The little girl was writhing on the floor staging a level-five hissy fit. You could almost see the flashing words in the bubble over her mom’s head: “I’m not a bad mother. Really I’m not.” I watched her expression go from horrified to resigned. With rapid-fire motion, she yanked a fresh Naughty Nurse off the hook and scooped up her daughter. I gave her a sympathetic smile, but she’d already turned her head, anxiously looking for the checkout counter.
Other stores have pretty much the same selection. Pirate Wench, Instant Bunny (complete with the Playboy Bunny bowtie ) Major Flirt ( this year’s contribution to the military) and Little Bo Peep in a corset and lace petticoat. But what’s really scary are the pouty faces and beckoning thrust out hips of preteens ( and younger) modeling these clothes more rightfully belong in the window displays of seedy downtown sex shops..
“I wondered if I’d accidentally wondered into ‘Sluts R Us,’” Rachel Mosteller wrote on Blogging Baby about her search for her children’s Halloween costumes. She hoped her little ones would have no idea about the meaning behind names like Handy Candy--a sentiment widely shared by other moms who’d had similar experiences.
While Halloween for boys hasn’t changed much--the same blood-dripping masks and ghoulish garb--“costumes for girls have traded silly and sweet for skimpy and sexy.” “ It’s a strange time we live in when half the doctors are women, and half the lawyers are women, and all the little girls are prancing around in sexy costumes,” said Albany family therapist Lindy Guttman.
Her comment is right on target. Precisely because of the anxiety over women’s achievements, marketers are pushing marginalizing costumes on our daughters, reinforcing gender stereotypes. Instead of dressing up as a scientist, engineer, teacher or Dora the Explorer girls are parading around as chamber maids in a low-cut bodies and mini skirts. Tarty-tween costumes for Halloween are part of the sexualization of young women and girls—a trend going on for many years..
Unlike healthy sexuality, the sexualization of girls provides a very narrow definition of femaleness with a focus exclusively on appearance. This skewed identity “leads to a host of negative emotional consequences such as shame, anxiety, and even self-disgust,” says a recent report released by the American Psychological Association.
When sexual allure becomes the only path to power and self-worth, the role of achievement, talent, and being a decent person are diminished. Reduced concentration at school, eating disorders, depression, and unsafe and early sex are often the result. The onslaught of sexual images is encouraging a whole generation of girls to think about and treat their bodies as sexual objects, things for others’ use.
No parent wants to be Oscar the Grouch on Halloween and overrule a child’s choice of a costume, but if a group of parents get together and set up boundaries on what is and isn’t acceptable for dress-up, it will be a lot easier to steer your little goblin in the right direction. It’s also a good idea to organize an email blast to manufacturers and tell them why you’re not buying Miss Sexy Sergeant for your fifth grader. Or protest outside a store selling sexy costumes for the younger set and help to bring community-wide attention to issues of sexualizing girls and young women.
Women have a tremendous amount of power, but we have to use it to be effective.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Sexism Kills...In America, Too
D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in their new book, Half the Sky, present a horrific account of violence towards women around the world. By comparison, gender discrimination in richer nations, including the United States, is far more benign, according to the authors. It is simply a matter of not getting girls on male athletic teams, an unwanted sexual remark from a boss, the gender pay gap. While the brutality abroad certainly demands our attention, it shouldn’t obscure the potentially deadly dimensions of misogyny on our own shores.
The United States ranks 27th in the 2008 Global Gender Gap Report published by the World Economic Forum, putting us behind Cuba and Lithuania. We’re only 37th in Health and Survival. Calculated by the World Health Organization, this category estimates how long men and women can expect to live in good health, considering the years lost to disease, malnutrition and violence.
And gender discrimination, long excluding women from clinical trials, has skewed the medical community’s understanding of serious, often fatal diseases. More women die each year from stroke and heart attacks than men, according to the American Heart Association and only 8% of doctors nationwide know this. It’s exceedingly common for women to be misdiagnosed and given inappropriate therapies because they may present symptoms unlike men’s and respond to dissimilar medications and dosages. “For too long women have been treated as ‘little men’…”said Phyllis Greenberger, president of the Society for Women’s Health Research, an organization committed to ensuring women’s inclusion and retention in clinical trails. “What it amounts to,” she said “is women’s health getting really short shrift.”
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