YEGfeminists’ First Meetup

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

About a month and a half ago, discouraged by an apparent lack of feminist groups in the Edmonton area, I decided to take the proverbial bull by the horns and start up one myself. I created the Facebook group YEGfeminists and sent it around to some ladies I knew might be interested. The response so far has been encouraging: 22 members and counting so far, and while that may seem small, so far it exceeds any other Edmonton-based feminist group I can find.

We had our first meetup this past Tuesday at Original Joe’s Varsity, and though only seven of us could make it the conversation and company was excellent. It was awesome to talk about feminist challenges in the workplace, feminism in pop culture, street harassment, The Ethical Slut, and the dozen other feminism-related topics that came up in person with real live people rather than just throwing out thoughts to the Internet void. Blogging about feminism has been a great outlet for me, but conversation with other feminist-identifying women is something that has been missing from my life. Big thanks to Stephanie, Kasia, Nicoel, Kathleen, and Holly for coming out!

I’ve set up a YEGfeminists Twitter account to help facilitate conversation, communication and future events. I’m also hoping to set up a blog we can use to aggregate and point to content from multiple Edmonton feminist bloggers.

The next YEGfeminists event will likely be in early August, and I’d like to have a topic or theme of the night to help encourage and initiate conversation. If anyone has ideas for topics or meetup locations, please leave a comment on this post and let me know! (A note about locations: I was messaged by a couple of under-18 feminists who couldn’t attend because of the no-minors location, so I’d definitely like the next location to be age-inclusive.)

Preventing Homosexuality & Non-Comforming Women: When Science & Medicine Go Astray

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Over at the Bioethics Forum, a trio of “uppity” women have written an exposé on the research of pediatric endocrinologist Maria New to engineer females in utero to be heterosexual and adhere more closely to female behavioral stereotypes. The article is lengthy and a little science heavy for those of us with a liberal arts education, but it’s absolutely worth reading.

It boils down like this:

New is giving pregnant women the steroid dexamethasone to prevent the development of ambiguous genitalia in girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). CAH is caused when a fetus receives an excess of androgens, and can lead to a number of things besides ambiguous private bits, including rapid childhood growth, delayed puberty and infertility. For all the outcry going on in feminist circles about this, it is I think important to note that CAH is a legitimate disease that can have lasting effects, and it’s important not to brush that under the rug.

However. This all goes astray due largely to motive. New and her partner Heino Meyer-Bahlburg are pointing to these surges of prenatal androgens as having a significant impact on sexual orientation, noting “research has repeatedly shown that about one-third of homosexual women have (modestly) increased levels of androgens” and “findings support a sexual-differentiation perspective involving prenatal androgens on the development of sexual orientation”.

The fun doesn’t stop there, though, and here’s where we start wading into seriously murky waters. Because it turns out these nefarious little androgens don’t just influence sexuality. Follows are two quotes from articles written by New and Meyer-Bahlburg:

“CAH women as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”

…

“Gender-related behaviors, namely childhood play, peer association, career and leisure time preferences in adolescence and adulthood, maternalism, aggression, and sexual orientation become masculinized in [girls and women with CAH]. These abnormalities have been attributed to the effects of excessive prenatal androgen levels on the sexual prenatal androgen levels on the sexual differentiation of the brain and later on behavior. We anticipate that prenatal dexamethasone therapy will reduce the well-documented behavioral masculinization.”

Most telling and troubling is this quote, which New reportedly said during a slideshow presentation/dexamethasone pitch to parents:

“The challenge here is … to see what could be done to restore this baby to the normal female appearance which would be compatible with her parents presenting her as a girl, with her eventually becoming somebody’s wife, and having normal sexual development, and becoming a mother. And she has all the machinery for motherhood, and therefore nothing should stop that, if we can repair her surgically and help her psychologically to continue to grow and develop as a girl.”

Read the full article these quotes are pulled from at the Bioethics Forum.

There are several points of fail here, but I want to point out three in particular.

Firstly:

The idea of “preventing gayness” is both horrible and, sadly, unsurprising. It is not medicine or science’s place to alter people to conform to society’s norms, and the extrapolated future world this kind of people-engineering leads to is not a world I want any part of. I am reminded strongly of Scott Westerfeld’s excellent trilogy Uglies, Pretties and Specials where bodies, brains and behavior is fiddled with to smooth out those unsightly “abnormal” wrinkles to make people more socially compliant, “normal” and “happy”. This is not acceptance or tolerance. This is an outright attack on homosexual, bisexual and transexual people’s right to exist.

From Alice Dreger:

“It sends the message that you must conform to the most conservative social norms to count as acceptable and to be allowed to live, with full rights, free of discrimination and abuse in American society. … A democratic medical establishment does not alter people’s bodies to fit regressive social norms; it advocates for patients by demanding the social body get its act together. As a white woman who grew up with a black brother, I can tell you that the solution to my brother’s suffering was not to have his skin bleached and his hair straightened, prenatally or postnatally.”

Read more from Alice Dreger at Psychology Today.

Secondly:

As a woman who is a poster child for “uppity”, I take massive offense at the idea that I am “abnormal” or need “repair”, and as a feminist the idea that females could be engineered to adhere to conservative, sexist, stereotypical housewife and mother roles is beyond enraging. If women want to be wives and mothers, to be quiet and unassuming, to stay at home, cook and take care of babies, then that’s their business. I have no problem with that life. But when people — and most especially female scientists working in traditionally male dominated fields — tell me I am behaviorally broken or wrong, then I am going to throw down and you will see what this arrogant, aggressive, “masculinized”, career-oriented, childless, unmarried female is made of.

This kind of sexist and homophobic thinking is why Supreme Court nominee Elana Kagan has been criticised for ridiculous things like not crossing her legs when she sits and playing softball. And why athlete Caster Semanya’s gender identity was publicly and medically questioned. Kagan and Semanya don’t fit neatly into society’s definition of what it means to be and look female, so we parade them around and label them as “abnormal freaks”.

These women are not broken and neither am I. We do not need to be fixed, most especially before we have developed our own gender identities and personalities. When parents start trying to customize their unborn baby’s behavior and cosmetic physical appearance to sooth their own heteronormative and gender binary biases, science and society has strayed into unethical waters.

Thirdly:

The thing not enough people are talking about when it comes to New’s research and the clitoral surgeries going on at Cornell University is the dubious medicine and science going on here.

In the Cornell case, Maggie Koerth-Baker notes on BoingBoing these are purely aesthetic surgeries that can and often do have well-documented life-long side-effects, performed when patients are infants and cannot consent, and are mostly to placate parental discomfort and “fix” female babies so they conform with societal physical norms.

“There’s been no research on outcomes for intersex adults, but there have been lots of intersex adults who’ve spoken up about being miserable with the results of childhood surgeries. Realistically, there are probably people who are happy with their surgeries, too. But, with the evidence we have, all we can say for sure is that there’s no guarantee surgery is the right way to go, psychologically, for each individual. Meanwhile, the standard practice is to not offer individual choice.

I’m going to go out on a limb and call that wrong. But this isn’t just oppressive to people who don’t fit a neat gender binary. It’s also not scientific medicine.

I love modern medicine. The skeptic movement has turned me into an advocate of evidence-based medicine — the simple idea that tradition, anecdote and common sense aren’t good enough reasons to ask a patient to spend money and risk side-effects on a treatment. If there’s no solid, scientific evidence, what you’re doing isn’t medicine.”

Read the full article by Maggie Koerth-Baker on BoingBoing.

I couldn’t agree with this more. When legitimate science and medicinal techniques are wielded against people unable to consent for wibbly justifications of comfort, abstract potential unproven future psychological gain, and society’s physical aesthetics, it ceases to be legitimate science or medicine at all. The literature suggests there is no evidence or medical justification for this kind of surgery on infants, so why is it being done?

When it comes to New’s research with dexamethasone, Dreger reminds us the research being done is not conforming to standard clinical trial procedures. Women are not being fully informed of the risks, and Dr. New has come under fire repeatedly from multiple medical societies for her methods and poorly controlled trials.

From a letter from Alice Dreger to the CARES Foundation which promotes prenatal dexamethasone:

“There are also important scientific questions raised by what appears to have been such a poorly controlled trial. If these studies were not run as real scientific trials from the start, as they should have been, then it is very hard to know what really happened during the pregnancies in which women were administered dexamethasone.

We are also very concerned by the disjuncture between what Dr. New advertises on her Foundation’s website (“Dr. New maintains contact with all children treated prenatally”) and the substantial number of patients missing from the follow-up studies on which she is a coauthor. Dr. New has made the same claim about continuity of contact with all patients to the CARES Foundation, even though her studies suggest otherwise.

Studies of prenatal dexamethasone give us substantial reason for concern for these mothers’ and children’s physical and mental well-being, particularly given that this usage is aimed at preventing a cosmetic issue (one not even shown to increase a girl’s psychosocial risk) and that 87.5% of the mothers started on prenatal dexamethasone will not even be carrying a fetus that is 46,XX 21-hydroxylase deficient. As mentioned earlier, studies have already shown some concerning adverse effects on exposed children.”

Read the full letter to CARES.

This whole thing is surrounded by fuzzy medical science and motivated by reasons other than the health and wellbeing of mothers and children. Evidence-based medicine this ain’t, and that part needs to be talked about more.

Girl Geek Dinners Officially Arrive in Edmonton

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Last night I attended the inaugural Edmonton Girl Geek Dinner, organized by the well-known Brittney Le Blanc from iNews880 and local Out Inc marketing mistress Shauna McConechy.

Girl Geek Dinners started in 2005 in England when its founder Sarah Blow had enough of attending technical events where she was among one of the only female attendees and frustrated by stereotypes that assumed she was only knowledgable about marketing and branding. She knew there were other women out there working and geeking out over technology, so she brought them together and started Girl Geek Dinners as a way of creating a female-centric community to connect tech women over good food and incredibly nerdy conversations of all kinds and colours.

Girl Geek Dinners have spread around the world in the last few years, and now — thanks to Brittney and Shauna — they’ve officially come to Edmonton.

There were a limited run of tickets to the first dinner; I was fortunate enough to snap one up the day they were announced, and have been looking forward to the event since then. The fist series of 20 tickets sold out so fast (four hours!) that an additional 10 were added, and those sold out within only a couple of days. It was fantastic to see so much immediate interest in the event right off the get-go! A couple of geek men were also in attendance, but the majority of us were women in technology and science. (Men must be invited by an attending woman, and women may invite only one man in order to keep the ratio to at least 50/50: this is, after all, a female meetup above and beyond anything else.)

First order of the night was a round of introductions that included each person providing their background, occupation and “geek credentials”, and it was a great ice breaker to come out of the geek closet and discover so many women with shared and similar interests from gadgets and gaming to role playing and crafting.

Shauna and Brittney gave a brief talk about their vision for Girl Geek Dinners in Edmonton that will include speakers, community blogging and event nights. One of the things they’re keen to do that struck me as particularly awesome is organize a dinner to connect women in tech with high school girls in Edmonton to help spread the word and encourage more females to pursue technology, math and science programs and careers. The more of us there are, the better off all of us are: there are still a lot of stereotypes and artificial, cultural barriers that discourage girls and young women from entering the industry, and I can’t think of a better way to encourage them than to get them hanging out with a group of successful tech women in their community. I definitely hope to be able to attend that dinner!

After there were door prizes (I won a free ticket to the next Girl Geek Dinner in July at Lux Steakhouse! Awesome!) and much mingling. It was a fantastic night, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the range of people who were there, particularly when it came to spanning age demographics. As a twenty-something geek, it was very cool to meet and chat with other geek generations!

Big thanks to Ceili’s Irish Pub and Restaurant who hosted and sponsored the event, providing one free drink per head and free appetizer plates. Ceili’s has a reputation in Edmonton for being good to the Twitter community, and the service was excellent!

Keep up with the latest from YEGGirlGeek Dinners by following their Twitter feed or subscribing to their official blog. Hope to see you out at the next dinner in July!

Busty Barbie Controversy

Monday, May 31st, 2010

Some parents are in a twist because Mattel’s new “Back to Basics” Barbie collection — featuring a line of dolls in modern cocktail attire — has a doll sporting a knee-length black dress with a plunging neckline and “bowling-ball cleavage”.

Let’s consider for a moment that all these Barbies, as a set, are themed around cocktail and evening wear. None of the dresses on any of the Barbies in this set strike me as particularly over-sexed: most of them are pretty standard fair, black dresses based on current trends or classic styles. There are only two showing off any extreme amount of cleavage, including the one in question and — arguably, depending on your perception — number 11 with the halter dress..

A concerned Minnesota mother says:

“I don’t want [my daughter] to think she has to be this, you know, busty Barbie who’s constantly wearing heels and these low-cut shirts. And that’s really the image I think a doll that you’re going to buy for a child is portraying.”

Read the full article.

Not for nothing, but some of us HAVE naturally large breasts and for me the problem at the core here is a culture and society that over-sexualizes large breasts and judges them as automatically inappropriate. I have large breasts and I’m sick of being policed for them, especially by other women: they’re no more or less appropriate than small ones.

What if the daughter of this woman grows up to have naturally larger breasts? What kind of messages are we sending to her then, that her large breasts are abnormal and ‘slutty’ just by virtue of their size? That she’s forever doomed to the “fake-breasted stripper look” if she wears a top that so much hints at cleavage? How is that any better than telling small- or average-breasted teens they need large breasts to be sexy?

Also — and I know I’ve said this before but I’m gonna say it again — slut shaming and madonna/virgin worship are two different sides of the same coin: women are either pure, modest and sexually restrained or slutty, sex-crazed whores. The clothing choices on this set of Barbies seems very measured to me given the theme: the hemlines mix from long to short, the tops range from turtleneck to plunge, and the sleeves range from full to strapless. As a representation of basic cocktail dresses women in the current day and age wear, I think Mattel did pretty well representing a broad set of styles and degrees of sexual expression.

Of course, they’re all identical body-types — skinny, hourglass-shaped and tall. That’s the bigger issue to me than what they’re wearing. Wouldn’t it be great if we could see a range of body-type as broad as the range of fashion? Short, stout girls, pear-shaped girls, flat-chested girls, tall and lanky girls, etc. Mattel is starting to think a little more carefully about race when they’re building these dolls (though still not enough: hair and face shapes still tend toward a largely caucasian standard even when the skin tone is modified), so why not represent a broader range of body sizes and shapes as well?

Sure it would cost more to manufacture, but also think of the sales potential! With a variety of body types comes the need for consumers to buy a broader variety of clothing and accessories, especially for girls with multiple dolls that wouldn’t always be able to draw from the same wardrobe. If I was Mattel’s CEO that’s where I’d steer the ship: good publicity and a whole host of new products to sell.

Boobquake: A Recap and Response

Monday, April 26th, 2010

It seems I am incapable of resisting writing something about this #boobquake meme that’s grabbed hold of the internet in the last week, so here goes:
 

To recap the Boobquake meme:

Last week, a senior Iranian cleric blamed women who behave ‘promiscuously’ and wear immodest clothing for earthquakes:

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi is Tehran’s acting Friday prayer leader.

Women in the Islamic Republic are required by law to cover from head to toe, but many, especially the young, ignore some of the more strict codes and wear tight coats and scarves pulled back that show much of the hair.

“What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?” Sedighi asked during a prayer sermon Friday. “There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes.”

Read the full article.

Jen McCreight, skeptic, athiest and Blag Hag, responded to his claims with an, ahem, ‘immodest’ proposal:

“On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that’s your preferred form of immodesty. With the power of our scandalous bodies combined, we should surely produce an earthquake.”

Read her full blog post.

She created a Boobquake Facebook event which in one week went massively viral, resulting in over 200,000 people as ‘confirmed’ guests of Boobquake. She also coined the Twitter hashtag #boobquake which has been trending in Canada on and off for the last week, and has amassed some 17,000+ tweets in the last seven days. ETA: as of 11am on Tuesday, we’re at 21,000 tweets.

Mainstream news outlets (like cnews, The Vancouver Sun, CNN, and The Examiner) got ahold of the meme, and then we were really off to the races.
 

The Boobquake Response:

Having never anticipated her little blog post would spur such a massive explosion, Jen McCreight posted a quick followup, addressing some of the concerns being expressed about the event, both in terms of the sexualization inherent, the specific call out to breasts as the method of immodesty, and the science involved.

“I just want to apologize if this comes off as demeaning toward women. To be honest, it started as silly joke that I hurriedly fired off since I was about to miss the beginning of House. I never thought it would get the attention it did. If I would have known, I would have spent more time being careful about my wording.

That being said, I don’t think the event is completely contrary to feminist ideals. I’m asking women to wear their most “immodest” outfit that they already would wear, but to coordinate it all on the same day for the sake of the experiment. Heck, just showing an ankle would be considered immodest by some people. I don’t want to force people out of their comfort zones, because I believe women have the right to choose how they want to dress. Please don’t pressure women to participate if they don’t want to. If men ogle, that’s the fault of the men, not me for dressing how I like. If I want to a show a little cleavage or joke about my boobs, that’s my prerogative.”

Read the rest of her follow up at Blag Hag.

The response to Boobquake has been varied and somewhat contentious. A rival Facebook event called Brainquake sprouted up protesting the sexualization of the Boobquake event, the (predictable) male enthusiasm of Boobquake, and the perception that women with smaller busts lacking cleavage are left out of participating. (Oh hey, didn’t I just post about social sexualization of large breasts vs. small breasts the other day? Breast-size shame goes both ways, though it’s a different brand of shame for my small-busted friends.)

There are feminist and cultural concerns, as well as concerns about the validity and practicality of the science being proposed here, especially in light of the fact that a surprising number of earthquakes happen every day.

Heidi Anderson of The Fat One in the Middle had some thoughts on Boobquake today that resonate for me:

“EVERY DAY should be a day when you feel comfortable expressing your sexuality and seeking sexual attention. Why has this event taken off like it did? Could it be that there is STILL shame in women expressing their sexuality? Of course there is!

But you don’t need a fake protest, catcalls from supportive men, alcohol, or the approval of your friends to be sexual. If you dress in a sexual manner, some people will think you are slutty. If you dress in a modest manner, some people will not give you the time of day. But the way we use Halloween, Girl’s Night Out, and now Boobquake as holidays in which “good girls” are given permission to be sexual pisses me off. You don’t NEED permission. You just need courage, and the willingness to take responsibility for your decisions. Part of that responsibility means being willing to give up the labels of good girls and bad girls, and just be.”

Read the full post.

Her words reach to the core of my own Boobquake uneasiness: I think a lot of females are participating, not because of any desire to show solidarity or debunk a religious man’s claims, but because it’s an opportunity to justify being and feeling good about being sexual in public spaces. Because women in our society still need an excuse or a reason to embrace and display their sexuality, largely for fear of the slut shaming that often accompanies women appearing in public as sexual creatures. And even when women do get that ‘free pass’ to be sexual — at Halloween, a girls night dancing, or an event like Boobquake — we’re still subjected to slurs and name-calling, often-times from other women. The number of times I’ve seen the words ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ used in anti-boobquake comments on Twitter today is disappointing yet unsurprising.

I’m also leary about the expectations we generate around those ‘free pass’ sexual days, which push women from one extreme expectation — modesty, sexual restraint, etc. — to the other. Halloween costume-hunting last year was particularly troublesome for me: finding a costume that wasn’t sexy (insert job/role here) was nearly impossible, and going out to the clubs on Halloween without showing off thighs and cleavage is apt to get you as much ridicule as if you went out any other night with clothing of similar style. Jen McCreight doesn’t want anyone to feel pressured to participate, but the reality is women will be: men and women will mock those who choose not to participate or weren’t aware of the event, and likely many women may be coerced by peer pressure into participating. The expectation is that, since this is now a ‘free pass’ day, any women who chooses not to take the free pass is prudish, prissy, bitchy, uptight, etc., especially from men who — for obvious reasons — delight in those days when women’s bodies are on sexual display.

So, while I’m still mostly up in the air about my feelings on Boobquake, I would ask the following of all people, whether you participate or not:

1. Be aware of your slut-shaming language. There is nothing wrong with disagreeing with the premise of Boobquake, but don’t use words like ‘slut’, ‘whore’, ‘hooker’, ‘tart’, ‘tramp’, etc. in your argument. There are legitimate feminist concerns and expressing them is important, but please don’t police women for choosing to be sexual. Women are entitled to be sexual creatures when and where and if they want to be, and do not deserve to be called whores because of it.
2. Don’t tease, mock, or pressure women not participating to unbutton that extra button or hike up their skirts. If you’d like to explain the event to those in the dark, go for it: some women upon hearing about it will join in of their own accord, and others will balk at the idea. Do not expect either, and please don’t coerce or cajole the ladies around you into doing something they’re uncomfortable with.

And so endeth my epically long post on Boobquake.