Attack of the 5-foot woman

Wishing for a feminist holiday miracle

It’s that special time of year, when people are spending all their free time in stores, loading up on gifts for their loved ones.

So since you’ve got your wallet out anyway, how about helping create a little holiday miracle?

The Toronto Women’s Bookstore is in crisis and could have to close it’s doors after 36 years. TWB is one of the only non-profit feminist bookstores left in North America,

For the past few years sales have not been enough to support the bookstore, and the events, courses, workshops and community resources they offer.   

In a last ditch effort to keep their doors open the TWB is asking for donations from the community to help cover the bookstore’s costs.    

You can make donations in person (73 Harbord Street, Toronto) over the phone (1-800-861-8233), or via a Paypal link on the website (www.womensbookstore.com).    

I don’t know about you, but I don’t know of too many other non-profit bookstores dedicated to promoting anti-oppression politics and feminist politics - I’d sure hate to lose this one.

Remembering to fight violence against women

This past Sunday was the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women in Canada.

A day when Canadians mourn the 14 female victims of the Montreal Massacre. It’s been 20 years since misogynist Marc Lepine walked into École Polytechnique and began firing on the women who were studying engineering there.

It’s heartening to see people still remember those who lost their lives to gender-based hatred in 1989.

It’s also incredibly disheartening to know that around the world, it’s estimated as many as one in three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or abused.

Sadly, a day to raise awareness and encourage people to fight against violence against women is still badly needed.

Just two weeks ago a Toronto-area man was found guilty of murdering his ex-wife and the wife of her new boyfriend.

Christopher Little’s ex-wife, Julie Crocker’s body was in the master bedroom with her throat slit. She had been having an affair with Toronto sportscaster Rick Ralph. Mr. Ralph’s wife, Paula Menendez, was strangled with a yellow rope and found in the garage.

These murders, in a way, have something in common with the Montreal Massacre - both are in a sense “honour killings”, whether that “honour” is felt to be tarnished by women taking up space in what once men’s domain, or by a ex-wife’s new sex life.     

When a man kidnaps and kills the wife of his ex’s new boyfriend, it’s about ownership. It’s looking at your partner as a possession, and the new boyfriend as having stolen something that belonged to you. So you kill his wife to take something that belonged to him.

I’m deeply uncomfortable with the term “honour killings”, mostly because of the racist way the term is used only when recent immigrants kill their wives or daughters.

But I’ve started to realize it’s actually a useful term - if we broaden who it’s applied to. A lot of violence against women can be understood as punishment for insults to their man’s “honour”.

As if raising a hand to someone could ever restore honour.

Polanski's date with justice a long time coming

Roman Polanski is a creep. It’s great that he’s finally been arrested and could have to face justice for drugging a 13 year-old child and raping her while she continually said no.

I don’t care how great The Pianist was, the people rallying to his defense make me nauseous.

But this poem published last week in The Nation makes me feel a little better.

Here's a little taste:
"He's suffered slurs and other stuff.
Has he not suffered quite enough?
How can these people get so riled?
He only raped a single child."

The missing girls

The Toronto Star did a fantastic article on women determined to have a baby boy are buying unmarked medication from strangers to affect the sex.

According to the article, Punjabi women face huge pressure to have baby boys – girls are considered burdens on the family. “Boys outnumber girls in Toronto’s South Asian community. In Brampton, for instance, the ratio is 864 girls for every 1,000 boys.”

For hundreds of years, women in many cultures have tried to control the sex of their unborn children, often to have sons which were/are considered more valuable. Recent technology like ultrasounds has made it easier for expectant mothers to simply abort female fetuses.

This sex selection is not an India specific problem.

China has 32 million more boys under the age of 20 than girls, thanks to a restrictive one child per family policy and the abuse of reproductive technology.

So what the hell happens when these children (those who are heterosexual) grow up and start looking for a mate? It would be nice if the shortage of women at least had the effect of increasing their power in domestic relationships.

But sadly, a society that devalues baby girls to that extent doesn’t always treasure adult women.  

The recent article has sparked debate in the GTA about the hush-hush practice of trying to avoid having daughters. An honest discussion of the pressure these mothers are under to have sons is the first step towards trying to end this long cross-cultural tradition.

Catching up

Sorry for the long delay between posts, things have been mighty busy here in the Northumberland News newsroom.

But I’ve been missing my beloved blog and there’s a lot I wish I had the time to cover. Here’s a quick list of my recent righteous rage inducers.

 - The sports world is losing it over South African runner Caster Semenya.

She won gold in the 800m race at the Berlin World Championships in August. The 18-year-old won by the big margin of more than two seconds but was still more than two seconds slower than the world record.

Because of her muscular build and some truly nasty comments from her competitors, she was forced through sex-determination testing.

A month, and one cheesy makeover, later the rumor is she has internal testes and too much testosterone.

This ordeal is widely publicized and it’s a sick invasion of this young woman’s privacy. It also goes to show how hung up we are on a strict gender binary (girl or boy) that Mother Nature doesn’t always adhere to.

- A former McCarthys partner, Diane LaCalamita, has filed a $12 million lawsuit against McCarthy Tétrault LLP for “systemic, gender-based discrimination”.

LaCalamita certainly wouldn’t be the first woman to find law an inhospitable field. There are now as many women as men in law school, but women continue to quit the profession in droves.

To stem the tide, the Law Society of Upper Canada launched a program to retain women in the field last year.

- Jaycee Dugard, snatched off the street in 1991 when she was 11 years-old, resurfaces after 18 years of confinement, rape and forced pregnancy. This story makes me sick to my stomach.

It apparently makes this turd wonder how she’ll catch up on all those missed sports moments. I am sure that’s her top priority, you callous asshat.

Alright, I’m all warmed up and ready to get back to regular blogging. Stay tuned.

Punching their way in

Women boxers will be allowed to compete in the 2012 Olympics.

Boxing had been the only summer Olympic sport without women competitors. Women have been competing in boxing for almost 300 years and they were included in the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis.

This puts the Summer Games way ahead of the Winter Games, where female ski jumpers will not be allowed to compete in the 2010 Vancouver Games.

A group of Canadian women ski jumpers tried to fight the discrimination with a complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. But the British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Lauri Ann Fenlon said the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is not governed by the Charter, and the organization does not fall under the court’s jurisdiction.    

“The IOC made a decision that discriminates against the plaintiffs,” Fenlon wrote in her 42-page decision. “Only the IOC can alleviate that discrimination by including an Olympic ski jumping event for women in the 2010 Games. There will be little solace to the plaintiffs in my finding that they have been discriminated against; there is no remedy available to them in this court.”

The IOC didn’t like being called sexist but is happy not to have to include the women in their 2010 Olympic plans.

“Our decision was based on technical issues, without regard to gender,” the IOC said in a statement.

Tell that to the women who have been dreaming of being in the Olympics for years and now, still in 2010, won’t be able to compete for no other reason besides their sex.

Working mothers being witnesses? Crazy talk

  Apparently busy working mothers can’t possibly remember things well enough to give reliable testimony in court.

Last week when Judge Douglas Cunningham ruled that Ottawa Mayor Larry O’Brien was not guilty of influence peddling, the judge totally discredited Conservative MPP Lisa MacLeod’s testimony because she’s a busy politician with a young child and husband.

“The defence was able to demonstrate that there were a number of rather significant things going on in her life when she gave her statement to the police. ... She was commuting regularly to Toronto for her work, leaving her husband and child in Ottawa,”

He concluded that her evidence was not corroborative of the Crown’s main witness and said, “I must assign it little weight.”    

Awesome, because you know we just have too many women in politics. Women aren’t being put off enough by the crazy hours, intense scrutiny or “old boy’s club”.          

If a successful MPP can’t work and have a family and give reliable evidence, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Maybe all working mothers should be barred from giving testimony in court because our delicate lady brains just can’t be trusted to do all that at once.

"Man"-ipulation

There’s something bothering me about the news coverage of the adult sentencing of Melissa Todorovic for Stephanie Rengel’s murder.

The case is shocking and I can understand why the news coverage has been so extensive.

Listening to CBC on a drive into work last week, one legal expert was shocked by the fact that a 15 year-old girl would be bartering sex with her boyfriend for the murder of an imagined rival.

Which forced me to admit that I’m not surprised by the sex in this case.

From a very young age girls absorb the cultural idea that a woman’s main - if not only - source of power over men is sex.

Sex is seen as a way to open doors, and Melissa would not be the first girl to hit puberty and get drunk off the power.        

She was obsessively critical about her looks (Body Dysmorphic Disorder) and suffered from Bulimia Nervosa, low self-esteem and negative self-image.

She’s been described as the master-mind behind the murder, and there’s no doubt she should be held responsible for Stephanie’s death.

However, while she was controlling and manipulative, she was also a victim of domestic violence in her relationship with her killer boyfriend, who had strangled and punched her. Womanhood hit this girl like a brick wall.

There are no excuses for Melissa, what she did was indefensible. But I hope that having painted her as the criminal puppet-master, we don’t turn the older boy who actually stabbed Stephanie to death into a blameless puppet when his sentencing comes up in the fall.

Why you should always let doctors cut you open

  A New Jersey court of appeal upheld the court’s decision to take a newborn baby away from her birth parents because the mother refused a caesarean section.

The mother refused the c-section which the doctor recommended because the baby was in distress. In the end the baby was born vaginally and totally healthy.

The baby was taken away immediately after birth and put into foster care.

Because the naughty mum disobeyed her OB and was “combative”, “uncooperative”, “irrational”, and “erratic” (unlike the usual stoic, pliant women in labour) she’s lost custody of her child.

The court used the woman’s psychiatric history as a major factor in the decision. If she hadn’t refused the major abdominal surgery, her past psychiatric care would never have been questioned.

If being a difficult labouring mother means your baby can be taken away in the United States, it’s no wonder there’s a movement of women deciding to give birth at home.

We don't support your kind of tourism

Tourism Minister Diane Ablonczy has had her wrist slapped after giving $400,000 to support the Pride Parade in Toronto.

Some hardliners in the Conservative party have their panties in a twist because of the funding that was used to help people with disabilities enjoy the parade.

“The pro-life and the pro-family community should know and understand that the tourism funding money that went to the gay pride parade in Toronto was not government policy, was not supported by – I think it’s safe to say by a large majority – of the MPs,” Trost (Saskatchewan Conservative MP Brad Trost) said in an interview with LifeSiteNews.com, a website founded by the Campaign Life organization.

And now the cabinet minister has been disciplined for the controversy, losing her power to announce handouts from the $190 million Marquee Tourism Events Program and the decision is being reviewed to “make sure that we have value for taxpayer money”.

Funny that the decision to give $400,000 to the Pride Parade has to be reviewed for value but the $2 million given to the Calgary Stampede isn’t a concern. Wait it might not be funny, it could just be plain homophobic - I always get those two mixed up.

The one thing I’m having trouble understanding is if the “majority” of Conservative MPs would not support the gay pride parade, why did the party have a big float in the Toronto Pride Parade?

I only wish I’d taken a picture of the Conservatives participating in the parade that I could post here, but compared to all the elaborate floats and costumes it was pretty dull.