Becky covered this story a while back, and while I find the trend ridiculous, ugly, and did I mention ridiculous?, and ugly?, this take on it almost makes it worthwhile as a faux-trend.

Christwire.org, in case you haven’t heard of it already, is a spoof site, but a brilliantly executed one, blending brimstone condemnation of and prurient interest in pop culture in a remarkable balance.

Extra super bonus:  the comment thread.  Hooo-doggie.  Actually, AVOID! AVOID! AVOID!  It’s a horror show, as the people who don’t get that the site is a joke are mocked in increasingly violent, sexist terms.  I’d rather get vajazzled.

From the NCPE / Equal Pay Day Site

Today, April 20, will be noted variously as Hitler’s birthday, the anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting in the U.S., and an excuse to get totally stoned  (huh huh huh, 4-20, geddit?).  More importantly, it’s also Equal Pay Day, which has been marked annually since 1996, when the National Committee on Pay Equity decided that the pay gap between men and women needed more attention.

In the States, April 15 is when our state and federal taxes come due, and there is seemingly endless pissing and moaning about how the government is robbing us blind (and here’s a game:  Count the Rape Analogies!), but I’ve yet to hear from any of these said piss-and-moaners that due to wage disparities, on average, women have to work 23% longer than do men to earn the same amount, without a 23% decrease in their tax burden.  (And again, this is average; many women of color are even more disadvantaged by pay discrepancies.)

Hitler, murder, and weed are perhaps not the best associations for this cause, so why choose April 20?  April was selected for its association with taxation and financial matters, and a  Tuesday was selected to represent how far into the work week women must work to earn what men earned the previous week.  (Seeing it on that scale really makes me mad, for some reason.)

So, what can you do to help out on Equal Pay Day?  Well, first of all, arm yourself with knowledge about the pay gap.  You can do that here, where there are lots of links and resources.  You can share your knowledge with other women, perhaps by starting a WAGE (Women Are Getting Even) club, to create channels for knowledge and to support women advocating for themselves with their elected officials and  their employers.  If you’re in a position of power in your business, you can lead the way by auditing your company’s policies and pay rates to see if  (IF?) there are significant inequities.  You can share your knowledge with your colleagues, your friends and families, and you can put the lie to the notions that “men are rightfully paid more because”:

• they’re better educated
• they work more dangerous or more difficult jobs
• they have families to support
• they blah blah blah garbage lying crap

The Equal Pay Day Kit has a lot of examples and templates and useful tools.  It’s probably a bit late to call a press conference, but that’s no excuse to let the day pass you by.  Put it on the calendar for next year, and get started now!

This week is sponsored by the National Coalition for LGBT Health, which has put together a nice website with all kinds of resources, including a list of events and things you can do to support the cause, whether or not you’re queer (everyone can call their government reps or write a letter to the editor).

The healthcare (insurance) reform bill was signed into law last week, but that barely scratches the surface of the particular problems faced by people who don’t hew to the heteronormative model:  access to educated and allied doctors being only the beginning.

The National Coalition also has some great fact sheets that you might want to consult when you’re writing those impassioned letters, or even just to educate yourself so you can be a better advocate/ally for the LGBTQ community all 52 weeks of the year.

Such as.

I came across two new books yesterday that were immediately added to my birthday list, and that I think a lot of you will be interested in.  One is more scholarly, and the other more pop, although they otherwise have a similar thrust that will seem familiar, given the conversations going on here at Harpyness and elsewhere in the fem-o-sphere.

The pop text is Susan Douglas’s Enlightened Sexism:  The Seductive Message That Feminism’s Work is Done.  You might know Douglas’s Where the Girls Are (1994), about pop culture’s messages to and about women in the 1950s  and 60s, and her voice is much the same:  sharp and relatable.  Now, however, she’s focusing on the last 15 or 20 years, and the “girl power”-ification of feminism in the mass media.

You can read more about the book and even get an excerpt at NPR, where I plucked this juicy plum of an observation:

Something’s out of whack here. If you immerse yourself in the media fare of the past ten to fifteen years, what you see is a rather large gap between how the vast majority of girls and women live their lives, the choices they are forced to make, and what they see — and don’t see — in the media. Ironically, it is just the opposite of the gap in the 1950s and ’60s, when images of women as Watusi-dancing bimbettes on the beach or stay-at-home house wives who needed advice from Mr. Clean about how to wash a floor obscured the exploding number of women entering the workforce, joining the Peace Corps, and becoming involved in politics. Back then the media illusion was that the aspirations of girls and women weren’t changing at all when they were. Now, the media illusion is that equality for girls and women is an accomplished fact when it isn’t. Then the media were behind the curve; now, ironically, they’re ahead.

The scholarly text–just out in paperback–is Feminism Seduced:  How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World, by Hester Eisenstein, Ph.D.  I’ve only had time to flip through the pages and skim her sources, but the publisher’s (Paradigm) blurb gives a nice summary:

In a pioneering reinterpretation of the role of mainstream feminism, Eisenstein shows how the world’s ruling elites utilize women’s labor and the ideas of women’s liberation and empowerment to maintain their economic and political power, both at home and abroad. Her explorations range from the abolition of welfare as we know it in the United States to the creation of export-processing zones in the global South that depend on women’s nimble fingers; from the championing of microcredit as a path to women s empowerment in the global South to the claim of women’s presumed liberation in the West as an ideological weapon in the war on terrorism. Eisenstein challenges activists and intellectuals to recognize that international feminism is at a fateful crossroads. She argues that it is crucial for feminists to throw in their lot with the progressive forces that are seeking alternatives to globalized corporate capitalism.

Obviously, Eisenstein’s book is a more global in scope, and she’s looking a bit more “behind the curtain” than Douglas, but the two seem to be inspecting the same phenomenon:  the commodification of feminism, used in the service of explicitly anti-feminist goals.  We discuss this all the time here, and I would highly recommend you seek these books out, whether you read them on your own and pass them to your friends, or (for the teachers among us) use them in your classrooms.  Douglas is very undergrad-friendly, and Eisenstein is probably okay for upper-level and graduate students.

Happy (or, more likely, angry) reading, y’all.

P.S.  These recommendations are not solicited in anyway; I happened upon these texts accidentally, and will get my hands on them for “real” reading in the coming weeks/months, I hope.  Unless Douglas and/or Eisenstein decide to send me a review copy, I mean…

WHER was begun in 1955 (!) in Memphis by a couple of dudes, Sam Phillips, who owned the station, and Kemmon Wilson, who supplied rooms at his Holiday Inn (then a small family business).  But other than that, this wee, 1000-watt station was staffed and run almost entirely by women, including:

• Becky Phillips, 1955  Disc Jockey, News, Librarian. Auditioned music.
• Rena Franklin – 1956-1958. Disc Jockey, Station Librarian, Publicity Coordinator.
• Janie Joplin, 1959 Disc Jockey. Had a morning show & wrote commercials.
• Denise Howard, 1955 Promotion Director/Designer/Account Exec.
• Bettye Berger 1957 & 1962. Disc Jockey & Sales.
• Dean Duvall, Sales Manager. Her nickname was “The Hat.”
• Marge Thrasher, 1960 – early eighties. On-air personality; first to bring the call-in talk show to the radio in the Memphis area in 1967.
• Donna Barlett, 1965- 1971. Disc Jockey, Copy Writer.
• Jaine Rodack, 1967 – 1971. Disc Jockey & Host of Talk Show.
• Jackie Kelly – 1967 – 1971. Disc Jockey & Copywriter & Traffic.
• Wanda Martin (Price) – 1965- 1970. Disc Jockey & Bookkeeping. She used to say while on-air “I love you whole bunches.”
• Sylvia Black – 1960s. Radio Announcer & Board Operator.

There were a lot of cutesy-poo trappings about the enterprise that prompt vigorous eye-rolling today (although I don’t know who was responsible, the male managers or the female staff) :  DJs were “jockettes,”  the recording/broadcasting studio was “The Dolls Den” (barf), and the entire place was tricked out in  “feminine decor,” which might sound really awful, but seriously, if you’ve ever been inside a radio station, was probably preferable.

WHER, the first “all-girl radio station,” lasted sixteen years, closing in 1971, and even though it certainly wasn’t intended as a feminist project, I’ve got to think that it opened a lot of doors for women in broadcasting–it was even racially integrated in the ’60s.

You can read more about WHER and listen to an entire story originally put together for NPR by the Kitchen Sisters (another lady-run media group worth knowing about and supporting) here (Real Audio required) or here (which I think has a little added material).  It’s nearly an hour, but so So SO worth it.  The last 10 minutes, which deals with the addition of men to the station and the de-girlification of WHER just as the Women’s Liberation movement was really taking off.

So McMillen–and the ACLU–are suing.

USA Today reports:

JACKSON, Miss. — The American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi today filed suit in federal court against the Itawamba County School System, which canceled the prom for one of its high schools when a student challenged a ban on bringing same-sex dates. The federal suit asks the court to force the school board to reinstate the prom and alleges that district officials have violated the First Amendment rights of Constance McMillen, a senior at Itawamba Agricultural High School.

“It’s shameful and cowardly of the school district to have canceled the prom and to try to blame Constance, who’s only standing up for herself,” said Christine Sun, an attorney with the ACLU national LGBT Project. “We will fight tooth and nail for the prom to be reinstated for all students.”

PhDork correctly summed up the school’s reasoning as: OMG LEZBOHZ!  Honestly, there’s absolutely no logical way you can argue that Constance McMillen’s going to the prom with her girlfriend and wearing a tux poses a threat to anyone. SRSLY.

According to the Associated Press:

The school board issued a statement announcing it wouldn’t host the event, “due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events.”

The statement didn’t mention McMillen or the ACLU. When asked by the AP if McMillen’s demand led to the cancellation, school board attorney Michele Floyd said she could only reference the statement.

“I guess they would rather do that than what’s right, what’s constitutionally correct,” McMillen said.

I expect the court will be constitutionally correcting the Itawamba school board’s ass pretty soon. As for “distraction to the educational process”–give me a fucking break. We’re talking about the prom. You get dressed up, you dance awkwardly to a slow jam or two. Nothing educational happens at prom, unless it’s learning what happens as a result of too much Southern Comfort and/or unprotected sex. And hell, one of my high school friends–occasional Harpyness commenter veggiewood–wore a chic pantsuit to our prom, and it was never an issue. That was 18 years ago! Come on, Itawamba County…get a fucking grip!

Of course, historically, Southern bigots have always found a way to pay for something privately so they can exclude whoever they want, be it private schools, swimming pools or proms. So in the the best Mississippi segregationist tradition:

The school district had said it hoped a privately sponsored prom could be held. McMillen said if that happens, she’s sure she’ll be excluded.

“It’s a small town in Mississippi, and it’s run by an older generation with money. Most of them are more conservative and they don’t agree with it,” she said.

This event is reminiscent of how schools in nearby Charleston, MS, had separate proms for black and white students until 2008, when actor Morgan Freeman agreed to pay for an integrated one (of course, he’d first made the offer to do so in 1997; it took 11 years for it to be accepted.) The first integrated Charleston, MS prom was the subject of a documentary called “Prom Night in Mississippi.”

A Facebook group just started, asking Mississippi-loving Ellen Degeneres (her family is from Pass Christian) to organize Itawamba High School’s prom:

I’m asking Ellen DeGeneres, an awesome spokesperson for the LGBT community, and all-around cool person to organize a FABULOUS and unforgettable prom, for ALL the students, to which they can bring whomever they wish as their date. We need to send a mesage to the people of that town, and all towns, that if they target our kids with their hate, and intolerance, we will shower those kids with our love, and support, and isn’t Ellen is the perfect messenger for this? Please help me ask her, she is a busy woman, and there are so many people approaching her for things, but if enough of us are asking, we might just be able to get her attention, and maybe make it happen.

The comments on the FB page are really heartening. It would be great if Ellen would help. It would be even greater if the ACLU opens a giant can of whoop-ass on the Itawamba School District.

Let’s all send some serious Harpy love and support to Constance McMillen, who told the AP:

“My daddy told me that I needed to show them that I’m still proud of who I am,” McMillen told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “The fact that this will help people later on, that’s what’s helping me to go on.”

Today marks the 99th such observation, although the roots of International Women’s Day go back even further, to 1908, when 15,000 New York women marched for their labor rights (and my little socialist heart sings!).

This year’s theme is “Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities:  Progress for All, and nearly 750 events have already been registered with the IWD site.  You can search for them by country here. (The UK has tons!)

Even though IWD isn’t an official holiday in the US, as it is many other countries, there are a number of events in NYC, and my choice of celebration is a screening and networking event hosted by RAHA Iranian Women’s Collective, at Alwan for the Arts here in New York.  (And BeckySharper, there will be cake!)

How are you celebrating?

Mom, can I ask you a question?

And so do I.

I just got an email from the Dude with that subject line, about an event next Monday that is full of awesome.  If you’re in the NYC metro area, heads up!

1.  It’s taking place at the Bookstore/Cafe of  Housing Works, which is a great charity that focuses on helping the homeless and those suffering with HIV/AIDS, and is a great place to while away an afternoon.

2.  It’s called “That Not So Fresh Feeling:  Marketing Embarrassing Products to Women.”  Who doesn’t love dragging things that are supposed to be shameful and icky out into the light, where we can see they are really neither icky or shameful, and have a good laugh into the bargain?

And oh, there shall be laughs:

3.  It features the author of the new cultural history of menstruation called Flow, Susan Kim, Hanna Rosin, co-editor of Slate’s lady-blog DoubleX, and Harpy favorite Sarah Haskins, whose Target: Women series (RIP) is some of the best feminist culture-jamming out there.

4.  It’s FREE, bitches!  (Although it would be very cool to make a donation to HW.)

You can get all the deets (not that there are many more) here.  Who’s in?

This football-playing dog is more open-minded than Tim Tebow. via ellenc995 @ flickr

Fujita plays for the New Orleans Saints, who will be facing off against the Indianapolis Colts in the big game on Sunday, and he is the only male athlete I can think of who is a vocal supporter of both a woman’s right to choose and LGBTQ rights. He’s spoken out about those issues, in part because of the flap over Tebow’s ad and a rejected ad for a gay dating service. (So, to recap: CBS approved an ad by an organization that wants to rescind an extant law that gives a woman control over her body, but rejected an ad so that bigots don’t have to think about the fact that two men are — again, legally — allowed to hook up. But bring on the ads of skimpily clad women!) Fujita is not content to just let this go without comment and justifiable criticism.

Regarding the Focus on the Family ad:

“It’s just me standing up for equal rights,” Fujita said. “It’s not that courageous to have an opinion if you think it’s the right thing and you believe it wholeheartedly.”

The Tebow ad suggests that Tebow’s mother was advised about having an abortion when she was pregnant with him, but chose instead to give birth.

“The idea of focusing on the family — who wouldn’t agree with that? But the means of doing so, he and I might not see eye to eye all the way.”

The issue is clearly one Fujita cares about a great deal. Given up for adoption by a teenaged mother, he reasons that “I’m just so thankful she had the courage and the support system to be able to carry out the pregnancy . . . I wouldn’t expect that of everybody.” His common sense reasoning is heartening, although it is simultaneously discouraging that this kind of talk is so rarely heard in the (dudely) athletic world.

As for the same-sex dating service commercial — produced by a company called ManCrunch — Fujita is similarly outspoken:

“The idea of doing it at the Super Bowl is going to raise some eyebrows,” Fujita said. “Do they have the right? Absolutely. Is it going to offend some people? Absolutely.”

Last fall, in an interview on the Sirius XM Satellite Radio show “Edge of Sports,” Fujita bluntly supported a march for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.

“Just because I’m in favor of gay rights doesn’t mean I’m gay,” Fujita told the host, Dave Zirin. “I know who I am. My wife knows who I am.”

The über-dudely world of pro sports, particularly football, is one with a don’t-ask-don’t-tell attitude that rivals that of the military. There has never been an active, openly gay player in any of the four major team sports (baseball, football, basketball, and hockey), and when retired NBA player John Amaechi came out of the closet several years ago, there was the sadly predictable homophobic backlash. For a high-profile player like Fujita to come out, so to speak, as an advocate for LGBTQ rights is remarkable.

Fujita contends that while there does seem to be that don’t-ask-don’t-tell system in pro sports, “By and large, the players are more tolerant than they get credit for. It’s not a big issue. Some guys will think you are crazy for believing one way, but they’ll still accept you.” That may be, but there is still a prevalent, machismo-riddled mindset that prevents athletes from coming out in public. (I refuse to believe that out of the literally thousands of NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA, and NCAA athletes there is not one who is gay or bisexual.) I hope that Fujita’s vocal support of LGBTQ Americans will move more athletes to profess their own support, and maybe show that players who want to come out of the closet would receive support.

I’m sending a big Harpy shout-out to Renee, too, for eloquently having her say about this crap over on Womanist Musings.