It’s a beauty

anjum has the Fourteenth Down Under Feminists Carnival up at stargazer, celebrating all the fabulous downunder feminist blogging in June 2009. It’s a great carnival. I especially like the occasional quotes from people’s posts that she has included in the piece. (And, ah, ahem…. I’ve gone and fixed the word I left out in the post of mine she has quoted.)

Spread the word! And think about hosting it yourself sometime. Lauredhel is looking for hosts for the 18th carnival (early November, covering October), and subsequent carnivals. You can find details at the carnival home page. Contact Lauredhel via the Hoyden about Town contact form, or at her gmail address, where she uses lauredhelhoyden as her handle.

Except for me!

Dear Leader (here in Australia, that is) has promised to lobby the Vatican in favour of the canonisation of Mary MacKillop [link].

Apparently:

Mary MacKillop would be a saint for all Australians.

Except me! And I suspect a lot of other Australians* who really couldn’t give a damn.

* I have dual citizenship, in New Zealand and Australia.

Friday Feminist – Iris Marion Young (6)

Advocates of an equal treatment approach to pregnancy argue that women’s interests are best served by vigorously pressing for the inclusion of pregnancy leaves and benefits within gender-neutral leave and benefit policies relevant to any physical condition that renders men or women unable to work. The history of protective legislation shows that women cannot trust employers and courts not to use special classification as an excuse for excluding and disadvantaging women, and we are best protected from such exclusion by neutral policies. Even such proponents of equal treatment, however, agree that gender-neutral policies that take male lives as the norm will disadvantage women. The answer, according to Nadine Taub and Wendy Williams, is a model of equality in the workplace that recognizes and accommodates the specific needs of all workers; such a model requires a significant restructuring of workplace policy.

In my view an equal treatment approach to pregnancy and childbirth is inadequate because it either implies that women do not have any right to leave and job security when having babies, or assimilates such guarantees under the supposedly gender-neutral category of “disability.” Such assimilation is unacceptable because pregnancy and childbirth are usually normal conditions of normal women, because pregnancy and childbirth themselves count as socially necessary work, and because they have unique and variable characteristics and needs. Assimilating pregnancy and childbirth to disability tends to stigmatize these processes as “unhealthy.” It suggests, moreover, that the primary or only reason that a woman has a right to leave and job security is that she is physically unable to work at her job, or that doing so would be more difficult than when she is not pregnant and recovering from childbirth. while these are important considerations, another reason is that she ought to have the time to establish breast-feeding and develop a relationship and routine with her child, if she chooses. At issue is more than eliminating the disadvantage that women suffer because of male models of uninterrupted work. It is also a question of establishing and confirming positive public recognition of the social contribution of childbearing. Such recognition can and should be given without either reducing women to childbearers or suggesting that all women ought to bear children and are lacking if they do not.

Feminists who depart from a gender-neutral model of women’s rights generally restrict this departure to the biological situation of childbirth. Most demand that parental leave from a job, for example, should be gender-neutral, in order not to perpetuate the connection of women with the care of children, and in order not to penalize those men who choose more than average childrearing responsibilities. I myself agree with gender-neutral policy on this issue.

Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 1990

School holiday project

I want to start teaching the Miss Sevens a little music. Miss Ten already plays a bit of recorder music, but she could do with learning some more in a structured fashion. So, we need recorders. We have several at home already, one sopranino, two descant, or maybe three, one alto and one tenor, some of which I play, after a fashion. I thought that it would be easiest if we had one descant recorder each, so I went into the local music store to buy a couple more.

And I found these gorgeous instruments.

Aren’t they beautiful? I thought that any child who saw them would want to play, and in the interests of fairness, I got them one pretty recorder each.

It worked (so far). The girls seized them with delight, allocated colours, and pleaded to start straight away. But I’ve been stuck with the boring old brown one that I’ve had for about 35 years now.

The project may or may not be successful; I suspect that there are even chances of the girls learning a little music, and me collapsing in a quivering heap, worn out by trying, trying, trying to be patient with the screeches, squeaks and squeals. At least the recorders are pretty.

Keeping up rape culture

From the most read political blog in New Zealand (according to Tumeke, that is):

I hope he tears the French Rugby Union a new orifice

DPF commonly disavows his commentariat, known elsewhere in the NZ blogosphere as the sewer, but really, DPF, when you buy into rape culture like that, you have to start thinking that just maybe, you’re the one who is responsible for providing the cesspool in the first place. Since when has it ever been acceptable to wish that someone would rape someone else?

Political commentary laced with violence and misogyny. It makes me ill. And I should have thought that the National Party (in New Zealand) would be ashamed to be promoted by someone who advocates rape.

In praise of my aunty, and something to go to in Wellington

I admire and like my aunty. She is feminist, a reader, a writer, a thinker, a singer, a musician, a maker of radio programs (is there a word for that?), an academic, a social researcher, a student (she’s part way through her PhD), and now, a film maker. Also, she has the most beautiful speaking voice. She was the first person I knew of as feminist; other people around me were, and are, feminist (notably, my mother, from who I learned my feminism), but my aunty explicitly used the title, “feminist.” I got to know her a little better over the past few years when we were living in Wellington, because in one of those two degrees of separation moments that delight and plague New Zealanders, when my book group wanted to invite some more people to start coming along, one of the other women, whom I had met only through the book group, said, “What about Marie Russell?” I sat quietly for a moment, and then said, “You mean my aunty, don’t you?” And she did. Thanks to Marie, our group read some of Elizabeth Gaskell’s books; if you haven’t read them already, I recommend them. North and South and Wives and Daughters are my favourites.

Marie’s first film is going to be screened at the Paramount Cinema in Wellington, on Saturday 11 July, 11.30am. Entry is by a gold coin donation. It’s a 35 minute documentary called “A Place to Stay,” looking at the social history of Salisbury Garden Court in Wadestown (Wellington).

How does urban design affect community? Through the stories of past and current residents, historical and family photographs, and newsreel footage, this film tells some of the unique social history of Salisbury Garden Court (Wadestown, Wellington) and presents a case study of the various connections between architecture and people.

You should go if you can. It looks fascinating. I wish I could be there myself to see it, and to celebrate with Marie. If you do go, say hello to her for me.

Barbarians among us

Seen in a display at Borders Bookstore this morning:

Do you like to eat like we do, then the Love Food series is perfect for you.

Sigh.

Shining a light

Our local shopping centre (quite large, well supermarketed and fashion boutiqued, bookshops, pharmacies, wine cellars and all that) has a lighting scheme for its underground carparks. Each park has a light above it, which shows green if the space is available, and red if it is taken. So you can drive in and spot where there’s an empty space without too much trouble (unless of course, you have a different colour perception range than the norm). Miss Ten delights in spotting both false negatives and false positives. It’s called “smart” parking.

But there are different coloured lights for some car parks. The lights always show red if the park is occupied (except for the false negative problem) but the parks for people with disabilities who use an access parking card show blue when they are not occupied. Blue seems to be a recognised colour for signalling accessibility parking, ‘though I couldn’t find any regulations to that effect.

But guess what colour they used to signal a vacant “Parents with prams and buggies and babies and toddlers” park? Go on! Take a wild guess, right now, before reading on.

Okay. Made your guess?

The answer is below the fold, and a few spaces down (to give people using feed readers a chance to make an unbiased (hah!) guess).

Friday Feminist – Catharine MacKinnon (3)

If sexuality is central to women’s definition and forced sex is central to sexuality, rape is indigenous, not exceptional, to women’s social condition.

Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, 1989

More libertarian than most

Scrubone is slowly, slowly, slowly* developing a graph of the NZ political blogosphere, based on the Political Spectrum Quiz. I’ve just done the quiz, and it turns out that I am a left social libertarian. Wev. Somewhat worryingly, it turns out that I am more libertarian than many of the so-called right wingers in the NZ blog scene. NB: Some caveats apply: it’s an on-line quiz; it’s biased towards the USA scene; it assumes the existence of a god; some of the questions are ambiguous. But it’s still fun, and providing that we are all answering the same questions, it can provide some sense of who we are in relation to each other.

Here’s me: 3.43 left, 6.55 libertarian.

That makes sense to me.

I’ve got lots of favourite sayings that represent my feminism, and among them is one I have adopted from Stef, the ex-expat, who posts at The Hand Mirror. Feminism means that I’m free to stuff up, and make my very own mistakes. Feminism makes me responsible for me, for the good and the bad. I’m damned if I want anyone else telling me what to do, and I’m equally damned if I want to tell anyone else how to live their lives. But I do want to make sure that people are free to choose. To my mind, contra Chandra Kukathas in The Liberal Archipelago, that means that you might need to ensure that it is possible to be free. And even if someone has chosen a position of subjugation, you need to be sure that at any time, she can choose to leave that position. Nevertheless, if that is what someone chooses, then even if I don’t like her choice, I want her to be free to make it.

That accounts for the libertarian part of equation. I’m not pure libertarian; I’m inclined to think that free speech is not a god-given eternal right, and that hate speech can be equivalent to shouting fire in a crowded theatre. So my response to this question on the quiz…

It should be against the law to use hateful language toward another racial group.

… undoubtedly reduced my overall libertarian score. When a black man in the US, an Aboriginal man in Australia, a Maori boy in New Zealand can be killed and the killers not prosecuted, or let off, or convicted only of a minor offence, then there is something profoundly wrong with the way we talk about black and Aboriginal and Maori people. And when women can be characterised as somehow deserving to be raped…. well, that looks like inciting people to violence to me. So I’m not okay with the freedom to spout hate speech, at all.

But above all, I support the right to choose, and make my own choices. When it comes to social issues, I’m libertarian.

But economically, I’m at least somewhat wet. I love taxation! And I absolutely love state provision of education and health and welfare. Why? Because they give people the tools and resources to be free, to make their own choices, to be responsible for themselves, as fully autonomous adults. And that’s why I end up on the left side of the economic scale. Freedom to choose is very, very important, but it’s also important to enable people to make those choices.

Take the quiz! Find out where you stand. But then do the difficult bit. Think a little bit about why you end up in your particular position. And more importantly, can you justify it?

Update: Scrubone has put his chart of the NZ political blogosphere on its own page.

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*Another Eric Carle reference.