Recommended Reading — Mostly Women’s Rights Edition

• A Proposed Small Step For Womenkind — Buttercup @ Buttercup & Bean writes about the problem of unwanted attention from men and how the real problem is not that women are putting themselves in situations where they could become targets but that men feel that they are entitled to any “piece of female ass that shows up in their vicinity.” Excellent post.
• To iPod or not to iPod (or, See the Person!) — Colleen @ For All the World to See wonders if technology isn’t creating a society of isolation and anti-social individuals.
  

  We pass people in the grocery, on the street, at school, at work, in the car and they’re just people. The plural, the generic, the masses.

  But they aren’t. Each person is a person.

  And what a difference we would make if we saw each one of those people as a person , not as one of a mass.

  As an individual, who maybe had a bad day, woke up on the wrong side of the bed, their coffee maker didn’t work this morning, they got in a fight with their kid, they got some unexpected money, they passed a test, they finished a big project, have a headache, found out their mom has cancer, found out their wife was pregnant….

  You get the idea.

  What if we each did that, maybe not to every person we came in contact with, but made an effort to really see the person we pass on the grocery aisle or who serves us our coffee, or who takes the parking place we had our eye on? What if?

  What if we didn’t wear our iPods so as to be lost in our own little world, but instead had the earphones out of our ears, so we heard the little old lady behind us in the grocery ask for help getting something down…or we actually talked to the server who takes our order, instead of talking to them in short, one-word comments while our cell phone is pressed to our face?

• TT #11: supercharge your life — Tinkerbell posted a Thursday Thirteen from a motivational email she got.
  

  • Focus on what you WILL do, not what you can’t do.
  • Prioritize. Be proactive by putting first things first.
  • Purposefully act, don’t react.
  • Face difficulties with courage.
  • Be willing to make mistakes, learn from them and move on.
  • To prevent being overwhelmed, ask yourself: ‘What one thing am I willing to do differently today?’
  • Communicate with positive language. Watch your thoughts and patterns of inner talk, and listen to yourself when talking to others.
  • Teach and lead by example.
  • Spend time with people you admire.
  • Be bigger than your story.
  • If you feel yourself getting into victim mode, ask yourself what the payoff is.
  • Feel and own your personal power. Know that you do have a choice.
  • Celebrate your results!

• Perhaps it’s time for tech employers to think out of the box — Jill @ Brilliant at Breakfast writes what I’ve been saying for over 10 years about the IT industry. The people managing the IT industry don’t know shit about IT. American IT workers have known that for ages. Apparently, Indian IT workers are starting to get a clue. This is a must read!
• anonymous said… — olvlz @ Echidne of The Snakes reposts a comment about a parent’s responsibility to to tell his or her children what they need to know to keep themselves from dying of AIDS and that goes beyond advising his or her child to just say no to sex.
  

  Parents who don’t tell their children what they need to know to keep themselves from dying of AIDS are negligent. As negligent as parents who refuse to provide them with medical treatment. What they need to know to keep themselves safe goes a lot farther than “just say no,”. Children don’t just say no. A lot of the time they say yes. Even children who have been told only to say no and kept entirely ignorant of condoms say yes. Parents have no right to pretend that there is no chance that their children will have sex. Refusing to provide them with realistic information about protecting themselves from HIV isn’t a right, it’s child endangerment.

  Amen.

• A Woman Was Lynched Today — olvlz @ Echidne of The Snakes started a new blog to report the murders of women who were killed because of their gender.
  

  A lot of you will be as surprised as I was to discover that according to crime statistics in the United States there are an average of four women murdered every day whose deaths are believed to be largely on account of their gender. Accounting for the size of the population, that is a number similar to the number of lynchings in the worst year for which statistics are maintained. This is a crisis that has been ignored for too long.

• Calling a Spade a Spade — Jill @ Feministe reposts a column by Bob Herbert pointing out that all of the recent school violence has been directed toward girls and yet no one seems to be outraged by that fact. However, if the gunmen had gone into those schools and segregated out all of the Blacks or Jews and murdered them, the story would be completely different.
  

  None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country, not that it happened to girls.

  The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, “When was the last time you got screwed?”

  […]

  We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational stories, large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. We’ve been watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And we’re still watching the video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and high heels.

  What have we learned since then? That there’s big money to be made from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic culture, it’s never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.

  A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so in the U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count. We’re all implicated in this carnage because the relentless violence against women and girls is linked at its core to the wider society’s casual willingness to dehumanize women and girls, to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels — objects — and never, ever as the equals of men.

  “Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible,” said Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of the women’s advocacy group Equality Now.

  Hat tip: Ezra Klein

tags: Women's Rights, iPod, technology, anti-social, outsourcing, India, IT, AIDS, JonBenet Ramsey, Bob Herbert, violence against women

3 comments

1. on October 17, 2006 at 5:52 pm

   Thudfactor » Earbuds: My Buddies said:

   […] Hat tip to n. mallory, who probably wishes I hadn’t. […]

2. on October 24, 2006 at 12:49 pm

   buttercup said:

   Thanks for the link and shout-out! I’m looking forward to checking out the other links you suggest. Nice boxing picture - it captured the spirit of what I was writing about perfectly.

   Cheers!

3. on October 22, 2007 at 2:41 am

   Earbuds: A Better Friend Than You at Thudfactor said:

   […] tip to n. mallory, who probably wishes I […]

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