Obama Blinks on Birth Control

Swell: White House to Announce Contraception Rule 'Accommodation' for Religious Organizations.

With the White House under fire for its new rule requiring employers including religious organizations to offer health insurance that fully covers birth control coverage, ABC News has learned that later today the White House — possibly President Obama himself — will likely announce an attempt to accommodate these religious groups.

Adding cowardice upon cowardice—caving, and announcing it in the Friday News Hole.

One source familiar with the decision described the accommodation as "Hawaii-plus," insisting that it's better than the Hawaii plan — for both sides.

In Hawaii the employer is responsible for referring employees to places where they can obtain the contraception; Catholic leaders call that material cooperation with evil. But what the White House will likely announce later today is that the relationship between the religious employer and the insurance company will not need to have any component involving contraception. The insurance company will reach out on its own to the women employees. This is better for both sides, the source says, since the religious organizations do not have to deal with medical care to which they object, and women employees will not have to be dependent upon an organization strongly opposed to that care in order to obtain it.

Let's be clear about what this means: An additional burden is being placed on women to accommodate the bullshit objections of a vocal minority who are playing politics with religion to complain about a policy the central mandate of which has been law for over a decade.

All of this "religious freedom" malarkey is the invocation of false ethics by some of the most unethical, cynical, opportunistic jerks in the country. This isn't an issue of "religious freedom." They're forcing Obama's hand, seeing if they can get him to throw women's healthcare and equality under the bus again.

And he just blinked.

UPDATE: The administration's position is that it's really no big deal because women will still get free contraception coverage—women who are employed by religious institutions will just get it directly from their insurers rather than through their employers. I still have some grave concerns.

Quote of the Day

"We try to look at child care as more of a form of work support."—Lynda Laughlin of the US Census Bureau's Fertility and Family Statistics Branch, explaining why is it that the Census Bureau assumes mothers to be the "designated parent" in a two-parent household, and why further it considers a father providing childcare while mother is at work/school to be a "child care arrangement" but a mother providing childcare while father is at work/school to be designated parenting.

That is to say that the US government is engaging in that most infuriating of parenting tropes: Moms parent and dads babysit.

(Not to mention that they evidently do not consider childcare "work," no matter who is doing it.)

I don't even know what the Census Bureau does with two-parent households in which the parents are the same sex. Curl up in the fetal position, cover its ears, and pitiably whine "No no no no I can't hear you!", presumably.

[H/T to Shaker Rachel.]

Number of the Day

$40 million: The domestic gross made by Bridesmaids just through "digital platforms including internet video on demand (VOD), pay-per-view, hotel viewings, and electronic-sell-through transactions," making it the most ordered VOD title of all time.

VOD hasn't been around that long, of course, which cuts both ways: It's the most popular VOD film of all time in what is a relatively new medium, but it just made forty million freaking dollars in a relatively new medium.

Which is to say nothing of the gerjillion dollars it made while in theaters.

Note to the Film Industry: Women are funny. Women want to see other women being funny. Men want to see women being funny, too. Women can carry movies. WOMEN CAN MAKE YOU MONEY. Lots of it.

On Hillary Clinton, Trailblazer

Last Monday, I mentioned that I'd been interviewed for a piece about Hillary Clinton and promised to link it once it was published. The piece, "Farewell to Our Feminist-in-Chief," which was authored by TigerBeatdown's Sady Doyle, is here. You should read it! And pretty much everything else in In These Times!

Although Clinton did indeed announce on Jan. 26 that she will "step down from her position as the Secretary of State when the president's terms ends," I don't know that we're really saying farewell to her. In fact, I suspect we are not. Clinton has hinted that she will continue her work on behalf of the world's women and girls in a different capacity, and she may well become even more influential in the private sector than she's been in the public sector. Having the length of your reach unimpinged by bureaucracy is an idea about which her husband has spoken many times since launching the Clinton Global Initiative, and it's conceivable that Hillary Clinton still has ahead of her a path along which she will open all sorts of new avenues of influence and opportunity for women and feminists, all over the world.

But she will, as Sady notes, be leaving a huge void. With no disrespect to women like Senator Patty Murray or Representative Nancy Pelosi, who are awesome, neither has quite the same profile as Hillary Clinton—and the void of a passionately feminist woman with that sort of recognizability is going to be profound.

To me, it's terribly concerning and disheartening that she is leaving an obvious vacancy—that there is still only room, or so it seems, for one woman among the men, that US politics is still doing the Star Wars thing: If you're a boy, you can see if maybe you're more like Luke or Han or Chewie or Yoda or Obi-Wan or Lando Calrissian, or maybe a little like each of them, but, if you're a girl, you're sort of measuring yourself against Leia. Like her or not like her—check one box.

A continued dearth of multiple types of women inhabiting that rarefied air means any woman who comes after her will still suffer the same fate of being passionately loved and passionately loathed, like her or not like her, because there aren't alternative models of what being a woman in the upper echelons looks like.

And additionally, anyone who comes after will be compared to her.

As if it's not hard enough being a woman who has to fight the pressures of tokenism. Now you've got to live up to the bar set by Hillary Clinton. Yikes.

We've let her down by allowing that to happen, you know? She has borne the burden of standing in for "women" for her entire career, with the tacit promise that it would all be worthwhile because she'd be blazing a trail on which many women could follow. But after decades of carrying that imposed status of standard-bearer for the monolith, after it was used to try to discredit her over and over and over, still she walks away from a landscape fundamentally unchanged to the sound of dismissive shrugs: She hasn't proven that women are competent; she was just exceptional.

Check out this fucking irony: The credit for being exceptional which eluded her for much of her career is now being used to wave away the obvious call for gender inclusion that her legacy should rightly inspire.

How truly disappointing.

At the end of the Beltway celebrations lauding her accomplishments at the end of her term, once the crowds have dispersed and the music has faded, we will hear in the silence a collective sigh of relief from the Powers That Be: "Well, we weathered that extraordinary career without being forced into institutional change! Phew!"

We've still got so much work to do.

Which reminds me of a dream I had about Hillary Clinton once upon a time: I asked her, "What can I do?" And she told me, "Everything you can."

News I Don't Want to Write About

[Content Note: War, reproductive rights legislation, rape culture, violence, misogyny.]

Here is all the news I don't want to write about today!

There is the BIG NEWS that Iran is totally going to attack the US! It's true! Or not! It seems like I've heard this story before: The administration of a first-term president before a hotly contested election says that US intelligence has found that Iraq Iran is developing nuclear capabilities with intent to attack the US and/or US interests, and there are UN weapons inspections, with which Iraq Iran is cooperating, but the belligerent rhetoric of preemptive self-defense keeps getting ratcheted up nonetheless, including accusations of Iraq's Iran's noncompliance with those inspections. THIS IS A FAMILIAR TUNE, SHAKERS!

"Wolf!"—The Boy.

In good news, the New York Times is partying like it's 2003, because they've already got a year of reporting covered c/o search and replace.


There is the news that Michele Bachmann exited the presidential campaign one million dollars in debt. And the news that Rick Perry blew through $15 million in the final months of his campaign, for presumably no purpose other than raising awareness about what a douche he is so he could LOSE FASTER! This is yet another golden opportunity for USians to consider how utterly fucked up it is that we do not have publicly financed elections or limited electoral seasons, and very rich people spend enormous amounts of money to get elected while other politicians who have already been elected argue in fancy buildings about how we don't have any money to provide healthcare, food, and housing to everyone in the country.

There is the news that former Florida Governor Charlie Crist might someday run again for office as a Democrazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Huntsman-Crist for President-VP of Napping!

There is the story about Janet Howell, a Virginia State Senator, who, to Make A Point, attached an amendment to a state mandatory ultrasound abortion bill "that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication." Hardy-har. Suffice it to say I don't find proposing the equivalent of a forced trans-vaginal sonogram law to be amusing, since it's little more than a sophisticated rape joke. I am, I trust it is evident, sympathetic to Howell's intentions, but I cannot get on board with fighting the nonconsensual control of the bodies of women and other people with uteri with a proposal for more of it, rather than less. Coercing a person to undergo an unnecessary vaginal probe to acquire a legal medical procedure is rape, and compelling an anal probe is no different.

There is news about ladies! The US women's soccer league's 2012 season has been cancelled less than 24 hours after the US women's national team qualified for the Olympics. If there's one thing we know how to do in America, it's treat women's sports like absolute shit!

There is the story of a man in Afghanistan, where we've been SPREADING FREEDOM for ten years and counting, who has reportedly strangled his wife after she failed to bear him a son. Three healthy daughters, though. Who now have no mother. Rage. Seethe. Boil.

There is this story about "three regulators [who] did indeed ring warning bells [about the subprime financial crisis]—at the right time, in the right places, and loud enough for other banking and financial system overseers," but were all ignored. Guess what they all have in common? Go on—guess! If you said they were all ladies, give yourself 1,000 points, redeemable at Shakesville's OMFG the Absurd Misogyny in the Year 2012 Shop!

Ladynews Trifecta!

There is, because I want to end on a hopeful note, this story about a potential breakthrough in cancer research and one patient's view of a future.

Talk about these things! Or don't. Whatever makes you happy. Life is short.

Photo of the Day

I was interviewed today for a piece about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and so I've spent much of my afternoon thinking about Clinton's capacity to inspire passionate support and visceral hatred, and what she's meant to and for women. I was reminded of this wire photo from last month, which is almost certainly worth my thousand words and then some.

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, center, is flanked by Lithuania's Foreign Affairs Minister Audronius Azubalis, right, and Lithuania's President Dalia Grybauskaite, left, as they attend an international conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2011, in Vilnius, Lithuania. [AP Photo]

The way President Grybauskaite is looking at her! She's Lithuania's first female president and naturally has been dubbed the "Iron Lady." I can only imagine standing beside one another, they both feel the world-vanishing intimacy of secret familiarity that only orphaned members of the same diasporic tribe can truly understand. TWO GELFLINGS!

You Know...

...what I'm really tired of reading about? Some famous dude who's having all kinds of angst because his famous wife is more famous than he is.

If I had a dollar for every time I've read the construction, "He was the more famous of the two when they met, and now his career is on the wane while her star has continued to rise," I would have lots of dollars!

I'm sure in my history of reading things, I've read the reverse—wife can't take being eclipsed by husband's career. But I sure can't remember it.

(That is not, by the way, an invitation to offer up exceptions to the rule. I'm just making the point that it is, indeed, an exception to the rule. The very, very annoying rule.)

I'm not primarily directing my ire at the dudes about whom this is written, since who knows if it's even true, though it gets printed like it is; I know lots of straight/bi men whose wives are more well-known and/or make more money than they do who are super proud of their wives and not remotely threatened by a career disparity that doesn't conform to retrofuck notions of gender (im)balance.

A few famous dudes end up in "she's trouncing me!" stories, however, because they've said as much themselves in interviews, matter-of-factly, like, Of course it pisses me off and makes me feel small and kills my boner that my wife/girlfriend is more successful than I am. Have you not noticed that I am a man?

But it's more just that this shit gets printed at all, and the fact that it's still so easy for so many people to believe, in the year 2012, that OBVIOUSLY any man would be emasculated by a wife who surpasses him in any demonstrable way.

Oh, pardon me—not any demonstrable way. Straight/bi women are still allowed to be better than their husbands at "female" tasks, like changing diapers or cleaning the house. We're just not allowed to be better than our husbands at Man Stuff, like a career.

Number of the Day

1.5 million: The number of women and other people with uteri seeking abortions who wouldn't have access to a safe one if Roe v. Wade were overturned.

Let's say, thought experiment. Let's say Roe v. Wade got overturned. There'd be 1.5 million women who had been seeking abortions who can't have a safe one. Someone will have an unsafe one and will die or be damaged for life; some women will have the child and not be capable of taking care of it. And we know that women who have unplanned pregnancies who go on to deliver have a higher risk of complications in pregnancy, high rate of pre-term birth, a higher rate of the children having behavioral difficulty, poor achievement, cycles of poverty, domestic violence. And the whole idea that somehow adoption can solve it all is just not how the American public thinks. Only 1% of women with an unplanned pregnancy go forward with adoption in the US—very, very small. And I hear it from my patients for all different reasons: they never could do it, the interesting thing they say is that they don't trust anybody else to raise their child. Will the child be loved? Will the child be well cared for? Again, it gets to the idea that they understand how important motherhood is—I don't necessarily see out there the American public ready to adopt 1 million babies. So just from a practical point of view, if you do a thought experiment of making it illegal or ridiculously more restricted than it is now, more women will die, more families will suffer, and that's not good. That is not a moral good.

—Dr. Nancy Stanwood, an obstetrician/gynecologist, abortion provider, mother, and board member with the Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, in an interview with Lola McClure, a registered nurse, about what she does and why.

Woman's Work

For a very long time, Democrats' agreement with progressive women was this: Vote for us, and we will be your champion. In practical terms, despite important pieces of legislation like the Violence Against Women Act and the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, being women's champion has largely meant making sure that progress women made wasn't allowed to backslide by standing between progressive women and the enforcers of the Patriarchy in all their guises—conservatism, religion, tradition.

But decades have passed with women on average still making less than men, still widely and primarily victimized by sexual violence (and still vanishingly unlikely to see justice for those crimes against them), still disproportionately affected by the nation's failure to provide a comprehensive and robustly funded social safety net, by unemployment, by food insecurity, by the lack of universal healthcare, by the lack of equal opportunities, by the lack of sensible and fair family-work policies. What social progress does happen frequently comes at the expense of women's reproductive rights.

Women who have multiple axes of oppression—women of color, women with disabilities, women in same-sex partnerships, women who are trans*, fat women, poor women, et. al.—are at increased risk of being marginalized and under-served by their government.

A government whose national legislative body, meant to be representative of the people, is still less than 20% female.

In recent elections, the Democrats' promise to progressive women has been reduced to ensuring (and only when it's politically expedient) that Roe vs. Wade would not be overturned, even as the GOP diligently works to render that ruling an empty statute.

Last spring, Shark-fu and I were talking about the blitz of anti-choice legislation in state legislatures across the nation, and she was telling me about lobbying in Jefferson City, Missouri—one of the many places bills limiting abortion rights are being considered. (The following has been published with her permission.)

Shark-fu: Jeff City was a train wreck. SEIU and others were there trying to stop the right to work bullshit. We were there trying to stop the 20 week abortion ban. And a whole bunch of losers were there showering the House and Senate with praise for giving it to the works and taking away women's rights. Ugh. I had a state Senator tell me that he "has" to vote for abortion restrictions so he can get other stuff done. The price of entry into negotiations with the MO GOP is women's reproductive freedom. I'm disgusted and dreaming of Canada.

Liss: "The price of entry into negotiations with the MO GOP is women's reproductive freedom." This is so depressing. I just don't even know what to say anymore. As I'm sure you know, the same legislation is making its way through the statehouse in Indiana. I'm not only dreaming of Canada; I'm dreaming of menopause, so I don't have to worry about the possibility of ever needing an abortion.

Shark-fu: OMG, it's so funny that you mention menopause! On the drive back yesterday I decided to write a post about how amazingly liberating it is to no longer have a uterus—every time I read a heinous bill I realize that they can't touch me. Sadly, plenty of the bills still apply to my post-hyster self. But they can't force me to get pregnant and that's so damn liberating it's sad.

Liss: If the fact that diminished cis female reproductive capacity (whether via hysterectomy, menopause, or elsewise) feels liberating for feminist women doesn't plainly expose how TOTALLY FUCKED UP the GOP's war on uteri is, I don't know what possibly could.

And then we lolsobbed forever.

This, then, is the situation in which we find ourselves: We are demoralized to the point of imagining, if only in passing, life in another country, or in another body, because we have been abandoned by the only one of the two nationally electable major parties who were even ostensibly on our side, who have negotiated away our alliance because doing so is the price of entry into doing business with the other party.

There is a presidential election coming up. The Democrats will not only want our votes, but expect them. And male partisans, having not learned the lessons of the last election, will admonish any feminist/womanist voter who does not axiomatically promise to give her vote to the Democrats that she is a fool who doesn't even understand her own rights or recognize her own best interests. We will be excoriated for even considering abandoning the Democratic Party, as if the Democratic Party did not abandon us first.

But this is not a post about voting. This is a post about the way reproductive rights are regarded—by the women who are actually affected by them, and by the party who purports to be our ally, and the cavernous divide in between.

My right to control my reproduction—and the respect for my bodily autonomy, agency, and consent that is embedded within that right—is central to my sense of self and my worth to my community and country. I can't put it any more plainly that that. The value of my very humanity is predicated on that right.

That right is not some piece of shit bit of legislation to be used as a dangled carrot during elections and used as a bargaining chip to be negotiated away in between.

And I'm angry that the party meant to champion women's rights doesn't see it the same way. I'm angry that there are so many male Democratic partisans (and not a few women) who claim to be progressive and yet think that whether I am trusted to make the best decisions about my own reproduction isn't a big fucking deal. Or want to lecture me about what a Big Fucking Deal it is when they're trying to bully me into voting for the party whose indifference allows the GOP to chip away at the scope of that right.

If it's not a big fucking deal to you every fucking day, then don't come shouting at me about it every four years like you're Professor Roe V. Wade, foremost expert in Abortionology at Gliberal University.

And if it is a big fucking deal to you every fucking day, then get busy getting involved.

Believe me, I know: Getting involved stinks. You're forced to deal with people who, on the best end, are deliberately obtuse bullies and, on the worst end, spam your inbox with pictures of dead fetuses. These are not pleasant folks, and I'd like to avoid them myself.

Unfortunately, that would necessitate closing up shop, putting down my teaspoon, and going silent. And then, somehow, magically not being a woman who lives in a patriarchy anymore.

This is the hard truth for progressive men who care about reproductive rights: When you leave the public fight to others, you're leaving it mostly to women.

I'll give you a moment to contemplate the many ways in which treating the feminist/womanist fight for reproductive rights as "woman's work" is some fucked-up irony, right there.

*a moment*

Now here's the other thing about leaving the reproductive rights fight to the ladies: Misogynists don't respect women. They don't listen to women; they won't acknowledge a woman's authority on her own lived experiences; they're not going to learn anything from women, and certainly not feminist/womanist women.

Misogynist anti-choicers who believe women to be less than need to hear that they're terribly, infuriatingly, and demonstrably wrong from men. Publicly. Passionately. As loud as the loud, so very loud, voices on the other side. One of the ways their self-reassuring bullshit works is via the effective void of male dissension, which supports their erroneous belief that they are the "objective" arbiters of womanhood.

They count on feminist men never showing up en masse for the main event.

They count on the Democratic Party being too squeamish, too spineless, too unprincipled, too apathetic to stand up for reproductive rights, unyieldingly.

They count on reproductive rights being the first bargaining chip on the table.

They count on the still almost entirely male leadership of the Democratic Party and the vast number of male Democratic partisans giving themselves permission to not get publicly involved, or to get publicly involved only when it's convenient and not all that risky and not all that hard.

They count on men trading on that privilege of not having to get involved.

They count on Democratic partisans being more interested in hectoring dispossessed progressive women than in being their allies and fighting this fight alongside them, every day.

They count on reproductive rights being treated as Woman's Work, and thus being devalued as woman's work inevitably is.

They are trying to overwhelm and demoralize the (mostly) women to whom this work is being left.

If the Democratic Party wants to retain its alliance with women, they'd better send reinforcements. And soon.

By way of suggestion, I recommend that the allegedly feminist staunch defender of reproductive rights, President Barack Obama, who happens to be currently seeking reelection, give some of his fancy speech-making on behalf of the 52% of the nation whose rights are being eroded. The states enacting a record number of abortion restrictions last year seems like it warrants his comment. Ahem.

[This piece was originally published in similar form April 4, 2011. It's particularly relevant again lately.]

Best. Rally. Ever.

If not strictly the best ever, it's certainly the best rally I've ever seen, anyway: "Two Chinese women's volleyball teams [the People Liberation Army's women's team and the Tianjin City women's team, according to a commenter at Reddit] expend an entire game's worth of energy on one epic rally." [Via.]


Video Description: Two women's teams volley for a point for nearly two minutes filled with amazing spikes, blocks, digs, and dives.

Honestly, it gave me chills watching it!

(Here's another great one, if you've not had your fill.)

Are You Sitting Down, Ladies?

I have some shocking news for you: New research has found, and I know this will come as a very big surprise to all you working ladies out there, so I really hope you are sitting down, possibly even at your desk at your job for which you are underpaid and overqualified even though you have asked for raises and promotions, that it is, in fact, NOT TRUE that women don't get raises and promotions because they are shrinking violets who fail to ask for them.

It TURNS OUT that women actually do ask to be appropriately compensated and promoted, but FOR SOME REASON we just don't get that for which we're asking—and, not only that, but "the gender gap in level and pay gets even wider" as the careers of men and women on the same track progress.

HOLY SHIT! This is some really shocking news, amirite, ladies? I never would have guessed that we were asking for things all these years that we weren't getting.

I can't even imagine what the perplexing reason is that we're not getting promotions and raises if we're asking for them after all. Oh well. Life is full of mysteries!

OFFS

[Content Note: This post contains expressions of misogyny.]

One hopes that, at minimum, he is aware we are not actually from Venus:

His career has shed light on the secrets of the universe, from the nature of space-time to the workings of black holes, but there is one conundrum that still baffles the world's most famous scientist.

In an interview to mark his 70th birthday this weekend, Stephen Hawking, the former Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, admitted he spent most of the day thinking about women. "They are," he said "a complete mystery."

I suppose that's meant to be charming or some shit, but one of the most brilliant male scientists on the planet talking about women as if we're a different species is not charming: It is rage-makingly Othering, and profoundly immature to boot.

[H/T to @CathElliott.]

Recommended Reading

[Trigger warning for violent misogyny.]

Mass March by Cairo Women in Protest Over Abuse by Soldiers, Dec. 20:

Several thousand women demanding the end of military rule marched through downtown Cairo on Tuesday evening in an extraordinary expression of anger over images of soldiers beating, stripping and kicking female demonstrators in Tahrir Square.

"Drag me, strip me, my brothers' blood will cover me!" they chanted. "Where is the field marshal?" they demanded of the top military officer, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi. "The girls of Egypt are here."

Historians called the event the biggest women's demonstration in modern Egyptian history, the most significant since a 1919 march against British colonialism inaugurated women's activism here, and a rarity in the Arab world. It also added a new and unexpected wave of protesters opposing the ruling military council's efforts to retain power and its tactics for suppressing public discontent.

The protest's scale stunned even feminists here. In Egypt's stiffly patriarchal culture, previous attempts to organize women's events in Tahrir Square during this year's protests almost always fizzled or, in one case in March, ended in the physical harassment of a small group of women by a larger crowd of men.

"It was amazing the number of women that came out from all over the place," said Zeinab Abul-Magd, a historian who has studied women's activism here. "I expected fewer than 300."

The march abruptly pushed women to the center of Egyptian political life after they had been left out almost completely. Although women stood at the forefront of the initial revolt that ousted President Hosni Mubarak 10 months ago, few had prominent roles in the various revolutionary coalitions formed in the uprising's aftermath. Almost no women have won seats in the early rounds of parliamentary elections.

Secretary Clinton's Remarks on Women, Peace, and Security, Dec. 19:

Now I know some of you may be thinking to yourself, "Well, there she goes again. Hillary Clinton always talks about women, and why should I or anyone else really care?" Well, you should care because this is not just a woman's issue. It cannot be relegated to the margins of international affairs. It truly does cut to the heart of our national security and the security of people everywhere, because the sad fact is that the way the international community tries to build peace and security today just isn't getting the job done. Dozens of active conflicts are raging around the world, undermining regional and global stability, and ravaging entire populations. And more than half of all peace agreements fail within five years.

At the same time, women are too often excluded from both the negotiations that make peace and the institutions that maintain it. Now of course, some women wield weapons of war – that's true – and many more are victims of it. But too few are empowered to be instruments of peace and security. That is an unacceptable waste of talent and of opportunity for the rest of us as well. Across the Middle East and North Africa, nations are emerging from revolution and beginning the transition to democracy. And here too, women are being excluded and increasingly even targeted.

Recent events in Egypt have been particularly shocking. Women are being beaten and humiliated in the same streets where they risked their lives for the revolution only a few short months ago. And this is part of a deeply troubling pattern. Egyptian women have been largely shut out of decision-making in the transition by both the military authorities and the major political parties. At the same time, they have been specifically targeted both by security forces and by extremists.

...That is why this morning, President Obama signed an Executive Order launching the first-ever U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security – a comprehensive roadmap for accelerating and institutionalizing efforts across the United States Government to advance women’s participation in making and keeping peace.

...Excluding women means excluding the entire wealth of knowledge, experience, and talent we can offer. So the United States will use the full weight of our diplomacy to push combatants and mediators to include women as equal partners in peace negotiations. We will work with civil society to help women and other leaders give voice to the voiceless. And we will also help countries affected by conflict design laws, policies, and practices that promote gender equality so that women can be partners in rebuilding their societies after the violence ends.

I highly recommend reading both pieces in full. This is a real thing in the world, and it is terrible and awesome and takes my breath away with an expansive hopefulness for a possible future so close I swear I can smell the earth on its dusty feet, yet just far enough away that the realistic contemplation of its never being realized terrifies me.

I want a world in which women are heard, in which women are agents of peace. I want it so bad, so goddamn bad.

Whoops

You know what would have made this piece about "Nerds and Male Privilege" better...? If its male author had linked to any one of the hundreds (thousands?) of female writers who have said the very same thing before.

It's not that I don't appreciate the effort and all that, cookies for everyone, but when the central idea of one's thesis is "A man can expect to have his opinion considered, not dismissed out of hand because of his sex," if one doesn't want to more deeply entrench that marginalizing dynamic, one would do well to acknowledge any of the many, many, many women who share his opinion and have, in fact, been disregarded.

Just a suggestion.

[H/T to Iain.]