Monthly Archives: March 2006

Friday Femmes Fatales

Friday Femme Fatales No. 50

March 31, 2006 – 10:06 pm

Break out the balloons and the streamers – we reach a total collection of 500 women bloggers. (Yes there are millions out there, this just seeks to highlight a nice range of them and give them a bit of publicity.

Why “femmes fatales?” Because these are killer posts, selected for great ideas and great writing, general interest and variety.

First off, unusually, I’m going to start with a whole blog, rather than a particular post, since it would be unfair to single any one out: Reading Middlemarch is a group blog of women (at least I think they are all women) reading George Eliot’s masterpiece, and reflecting on it as they go. A great idea – and it would be fascinating if someone wanted to do something similar with a feminist classic – say The Female Eunuch? (Just a thought… I’m already committed to a variety of projects for about 23 hours a day.)

Turning back to the politics – well I have too, even if with a heavy heart – but let’s start with a positive story: on Avast! Feminist Conspiracy! (which proves from its title that irony is alive and well in America – whew!) an account of the campaign of Tammy Duckworth, “a disabled combat veteran and a woman of color, running on the kind of democratic platform that many of us joined the party for”.

Also on a note of celebration, Mikaila on The Pan Collective (a women’s blog “on Caribbean life” makes her first blog post, celebrating Jamaica’s first female Prime Minister – the Honorable Portia Simpson Miller.

Now I think Hecate on her blog should stop pulling her punches, say what she really thinks, as on the case of the Wiccan high priests versus a Great Falls, South Carolina town council. “The basic premise is that if xians aren’t allowed to shove their religion down everyone else’s throat, then the xians are being persecuted,” she says.

Belledame222 on Fetch My Axe (know the feeling) reflects on sex, porn, oh, all those issues around sex-positive feminism.

Turning to the artistic side, Lisa Call is, I guess you’d say, an artistic quilter, or an artist who quilts…? Forgive me; not my area. But she’s tracked the movement of her Welcome to Parker and given us a peak.

Then to the heartbreaking work – in this case medical – side. On Lost in Sasazuka, Kim is a final-year medical student on placement in the “deepest darkest Northern Territory” (Australia). And this is her quite technical, but deeply moving, account of the attempts to treat a young child, a case of ‘third world’ lifestyle – dirty water & overcrowding, managed with with ‘first world’ knowledge and resources.

Staying in warmer parts, That Girl in Samoa attends a movie premiere, a rather special premiere, of the the first Pacific Island feature length film, Sione’s Wedding.

Finally, a fun link for readers who have lots of computer power to burn – mine is still groaning. (If you’re on dial-up DO NOT CLICK.) On i-Anya Angela Thomas has a Tibetan-themed music sim.

And next week, we’ll continue on, towards the 1,000 mark….

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If you missed last week’s edition, it is here.

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Please: In the next week if you read, or write, a post by a woman blogger and think “that deserves a wider audience” (particularly someone who doesn’t yet get many hits), drop a comment here.

It really does make my life easier!

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Carnival of Feminists

The Carnival of Feminists makes the mainstream media

March 31, 2006 – 3:41 pm

Finally, a mainstream media article that gets beyond Belle Du Jour as a female blogger – indeed to the Carnival of Feminists. Kira Cochrane in the Guardian today explores the phenomenon of feminist blogging, and, yes, I do get in a quote or two as founder of the carnival. Others mentioned include Feministing, Bitch PhD, the F-word, Pandagon, AngryBlackBitch, MindtheGapCardiff and Gendergeek.

I’ve made all of those links, because the Guardian didn’t. It’s probably the single most web-friendly newspaper in the world, but it still has some way to go…

(Thanks to Clare on The Ninth Wave who drew my attention to it.)

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Environmental politics Feminism

Another fundamentally anti-female culture…

March 31, 2006 – 10:11 am

A Japanese feminist has beenbanned from speaking at a lecture series by the Tokyo Municipal Government:

“Last July, Professor Ueno was chosen by a citizens’ group in the Greater Tokyo district of Kokubunji as the first speaker in a series of lectures on human rights; the events were to be sponsored by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. But according to the group, Tokyo officials objected to the choice of Ueno because she might use the phrase “gender-free” – a poorly defined term originally intended to mean free from sexual bias. The citizen’s group refused to find another speaker and instead cancelled the series of events. …
“Gender-free” is an imported English phrase that has been used in Japan since the mid-1990s. Some progressive teachers and local education authorities have used the phrase to promote liberal sex education, and the mixed listing of boys and girls on school roll calls. The latter is contentious in Japan where traditionally boys’ names are read out first.

Nothing like telling kids from an early age who is regarded as important…

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I eat organic food (as much as I can, while also trying to take account of “food miles”) primarily because I think the form of farming needs to be encouraged. (And organic yoghurt tastes MUCH better than the plastic non-organic stuff.) But like the author of this article whether there is any actual direct harm from the pesticides in food I’m not sure. But he offers an interesting parallel:

He cited the long-burning, but now resolved, debate about the health impact of smoking: “An official at Brown & Williamson, a cigarette maker now owned by RJ Reynolds, once noted in a memo: ‘Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public.’ Toward that end, the tobacco manufacturers dissected every study, highlighted every question, magnified every flaw, cast every possible doubt every possible time … It was all a charade, of course, because the real science was inexorable. But the uncertainty campaign was effective: it delayed public-health protections, and compensation for tobacco’s victims, for decades.”
Pesticide campaigners say that they see some parallels in their own struggle to get pesticides banned or severely restricted.

You might make the same parallel with those proclaiming their doubts about the reality of global warming.

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Some interesting figures on immigration, legal and illegal:

* There are between 310,000 and 570,000 illegal immigrants in the UK, according to Home Office estimates
* If allowed to live legally, they would pay more than £1bn in tax each year
* Migrants fill 90% of low-paid jobs in London and account for 29% of the capital’s workforce. London is the UK’s fastest-growing region
* Legal migrants comprise 8.7% of the population, but contribute 10.2% of all taxes. Each immigrant pays an average of £7,203 in tax, compared with £6,861 for non-migrant workers
* There were 25,715 people claiming asylum last year. If allowed to work, they would generate £123m for the Treasury

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Environmental politics

Wealth and poverty

March 30, 2006 – 9:03 pm

A very curious afternoon of Green canvassing today, from the Regent’s Park council estate – and some lovely polite pensioners – over 100 metres or so to the extreme wealth of the Georgian mansions lining the park. Not much luck there, it seems the rich are still in Barbados, or in the office working to pay for all of this. If anyone is at home it is usually “the staff”.

Not quite as bad as Manila, where (when I was there anyway) there was a corrugated-iron shanty town in the shadow of the presidential palace, but close.

Seems an appropriate point to direct attention to this article on the measurement of poverty, which argues for adopting a poverty line that measures relative poverty. (And incidentally tells of the career of an obviously very formidable woman, Mollie Orshansky.)

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History

A ‘bargain’ First Folio

March 30, 2006 – 3:58 pm

Should you happen to have a spare £3.5m or so, an extraordinarily rare Shakespeare First Folio is being auctioned on July 13.

Printed in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the folio was assembled and edited by John Heminges and Henry Condell, fellow actors who performed with Shakespeare in the King’s Men, the company for which he wrote. The folio contains 36 plays, 18 of which – including Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew and As You Like It – had never been printed before and, were it not for their appearance in the folio, would most probably have been lost forever. On its publication, the folio sold for around 20 shillings (equivalent to approximately £100 today).

Coincidentally, I’ve recently been reading about the edition in the small but astonishingly informative pamphlet that accompanied the Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition in 1991. (P.W. Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare, Folger Library, Washington, 1991.)

There are about 240 surviving copies (the “about” is because in the 19th century collectors and booksellers gathered together fragments – sometimes from different editions). Half of them are held by the Folger, and they have been studied in truly exhaustive detail, to the point where the number of typesettersrs, and the pages they prepared, have been convincingly identified.

The one being sold in the summer is one of only two in the original binding to be held in private hands. One of the “public” original versions has quite a tale. Under an agreement of 1611, it was donated to Sir Thomas Bodley’s library in Oxford, one of a batch of books sent to the University’s binder on 17 Feb 1624. It was sold by the library as a duplicate(!) in the 1660s, but luckily bought back in 1905, when the price was no doubt considerably lower than it would be today.

Should the budget in July not quite stretch to £3.5 million, you can view an online version.

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Environmental politics History

Test your reading skills …

March 29, 2006 – 9:59 pm

I’m drooping over the keyboard, having spent my day dashing around, and around, and around Camden, helping to sort out nomination papers for the total of 54 candidates the Green Party is hoping to stand (so everyone will have the chance to give us their three votes). For those who claim civil society is dead, or that community spirit is, it is lovely to see the response of people when you knock on the door asking for their signature. They are really pleasant and helpful, even when they aren’t Green voters.

But a couple of little gems from the Inbox:

Test your ability to read 17th-century handwriting, and learn how to do it better – a great idea. There are seven documents, rated into three levels of difficulty. You type your reading in, and the site compares it to the “perfect” one. Too tired to even think about trying it, but I will. (Although whether I share the results might depend on how I do…!)

Then, we’ve already learnt to think about food miles, but this article goes further in saying we should look at the “fuel consumption” of everything we eat. Food for thought. Guess I’d better join that 10-year waiting list for an allotment…

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