I’ve been reading a bit about the new birth control pill called Anya, which carries the rather dubious benefit of completely stopping the period of any woman who takes it. The Montreal Mirror just praised it as “Angel of the Week”, suggesting that women will be universally delighted to rid ourselves of the dreaded Aunt Flow. Periods have long been a huge cash cow for companies who need to convince us of the importance of keeping our monthlies discreet and under wraps, mostly by telling us they’re nasty, shameful occurances best kept secret. “Menstrual suppressants” seem to be the latest thing being touted to women as empowering and liberating, and quite frankly the whole deal sketches me out.

Now, I’m not going to get all earth-goddess on you here; I don’t necessarily see my period as a beautiful gift from Mother Nature that should be protected at all cost. But I refuse to buy into yet another product-pitch that seems to want to convince me that the way my body has functioned since age twelve is messy, inconvenient, and gross.

Marketers love to use the feminist language of choice to convince us that the latest technological or pharmaceutical development is in our best interest, if not downright empowering: we can now choose whether or not we bleed, just like we can choose to pump up our breasts or snip our labia. But is it really women who are going to benefit from this? Or is it just another attempted cash-grab off of women’s insecurities?

Macleans published this article last year, which offers a rather more nuanced take on the drug. It seems that, since no one is entirely sure why menstruation exists, evolutionarily speaking at least, the health benefits (or downsides) to stopping it are anyone’s guess. And it looks like the next generation of pubescent women will be the guinea pigs.

As one health practitioner in the Macleans article points out, ejaculation is messy, inconvenient, and in most instances unnecessary. I wonder how many research dollars have been allocated to develop a pill that will suppress it.

N.B. I sent a letter along these lines to the Mirror; we’ll see if it makes the light of day.

This summer the XVI International Aids Conference is happening in Toronto (Aug 13-18) and the women’s march committee is looking for volunteers for the Women & Girls Rally and March (Aug 14).

This is a pressing issue. As an e-mail from the committee states: “Globally, women comprise almost 50% of adults living with HIV. Nearly 25 years into the epidemic, gender inequality and the low status of women remain two of the principal drivers of HIV. Yet current AIDS responses do not, on the whole, tackle the social, cultural and economic factors that put women at risk of HIV and that unduly burden them with the epidemic’s consequences.”

“The purpose of this march is to demonstrate support for women and girls infected and affected by HIV/AIDS, to raise awareness of issues related to women and girls and HIV and to urge world leaders and other key stakeholders to act now.”

Speakers at the rally include: Louise Binder, Blueprint for Action on Women
and Girls and HIV/AIDS, Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in
Africa, Violeta Ross Quiroga, International Community of Women Living with HIV and AIDS, Dr. Helene Gayle, President, International AIDS Society & CEO, CARE USA and Kecia Larkin, Red Road HIV/AIDS Network. Posawawajek ‘Echo Singers’ Drummers will perform.

They need folks to volunteer in the following areas:
1. Promotion (flyer distribution)*
2. Placard Construction & Banner Making*
3. Memory Flag Installation*
4. Marshals
5. Placard Distribution
6. T-Shirt Table
7. Water table
8. Media/Speakers Table
9. Chant Leaders

*These volunteers will be needed in the days prior to the march.

If you’re interested send an email to Venus Yam, Volunteer Coordinator (venus.yam at gmail dot com) with your name, age, phone number, email, and your top three volunteer preferences. Please include the dates and/or times from August 10-14 that you are available. If you are volunteering as a marshal, please indicate whether or not you have experience marshalling.

Sad music news today: Sleater-Kinney are calling it quits after their summer tour, which sadly has no Canadian dates. The story, on Pitchfork, rightly calls the band “America’s greatest rock band.” I couldn’t agree more.

Though the band’s style and politics evolved over the 11 years they played together — they started out steeped in the sounds of Riot Grrrl and kept evolving and changing to sound like nothing else, taking on George W. Bush and his war along the way — Sleater-Kinney will be remembered as the definitive indie rock girl band of our generation. This despite the fact in interviews the women insisted that they were just a band (not a girl band), which brought up interesting discussions of gender nonetheless, discussions that rarely surface during interviews with male musicians.

Sleater-Kinney played an important role in shaping my feminist politics, so their ending makes me very sad. So long SK, thanks for all the music and for fuelling my rockstar dreams. Sleater-Kinney listening party, anyone?

Check out this fascinating essay on CBC Arts about Annie Pootoogook’s exhibit at Toronto’s Power Plant Gallery. As the piece’s author, David Balzer, writes, “Pootoogooks new exhibit at Torontos Power Plant is a debut in more ways than one. Not only is it her first at a Canadian public gallery, but its also the first time the Power Plant, Canadas pre-eminent venue for contemporary art, has dedicated a major show to an Inuit artist.”

His essay explores three generations of Inuit women artists, the north/south divide many Canadians don’t even think about, and some of the gendered issues Inuit women face, which Pootoogook deals with in hter work. The piece is accompanied by some of Pootoogook’s beautiful artwork.

In response to Nicole’s post Sweet Victories I mentioned a Kokanee TV ad that’s currently running. In it, a stereotypically creepy (yellow-tinged aviator glasses, beer belly, large mustache) “glacier ranger” auditions three well-endowed women in matching skin-tight silver ski suits (whoops, alliteration) for the job of “protecting the glacier.” They ski, make sexy faces, ride bikes, and in the last scene, take off their ski suits to reveal matching silver string bikinis.

[Sidebar: I suppose this commercial also ties into our discussion of raunch culture, and female collusion in the objectification of women, since the women in the commercial behave as if the ranger’s leers turn them on, and as if they get pleasure from pleasuring him. (Yick!)]

This commerical is patently appalling - in fact, it’s so appalling that it doesn’t seem like there’s any point in even mentioning it. It didn’t occur to me to blog about it until Nicole mentioned the Ms. Moosehead campaign. Ads like the Kokanee one are disturbing examples of the anti-feminist backlash, or the cyclical amnesia of feminism - i.e. ads have actually gotten more sexist, despite the fact that we’re supposedly living in progressive times. The problem with such shameless sexism is that it’s so awful that there really isn’t anything to say about it. And the scope of the ad’s gross-a-tating-ness is so overwhelming, it’s disempowering. Also it seems like our feminist forerunners have already said all there is to say about them, so what could we possibly add?

However, is being silent about ads whose horrors speak for themselves really the right tactic? What can we do about ads like this? Should we write in to Kokanee?

Attention Asian/South Asian/ Pacific Islander youth in the Greater Toronto Area:

The Asian Arts Freedom School is a new project of ASAO, a Toronto group of Asian/ Pacific Islander (API) activist rappers, spoken-word artists, musicians, writers and beatboxers. The aim is to teach youth writing and performance skills and radical API history you wont learn in school.

The Freedom School runs on Tuesday nights from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., July 11 to August 29 at the Kapisanan Philippine Arts Centre (167 Augusta Ave., Toronto). Each workshop will be a chance to learn a different skill (performing your work, beatboxing, using movement), create new pieces and learn histories of Asian activism and resistance.

The workshops are free! There will also be food and free TTC tokens. As the e-mail about the Freedom School says, “To us Asian = East Asian, SouthEast Asian, South Asian, West Asian (a.k.a. Arab or Middle-Eastern), mixed-race, adoptee, suburban, hood, just got here or been here since the 1800s from the Philippines to Palestine, North China to Sri Lanka.”

For info and registration contact Gein Wong (gein at poetic dot com) or Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (brownstargirl at riseup dot net).

Well, Toronto has Pride, but Montreal has Le Boudoir (okay, we have Pride too, but not until July). For those who have never been, Le Boudoir is a lesbian cabaret featuring some of the city’s finest performers, who don feather boas, ascot ties and monocles, tap shoes, and peek-a-boo Zoot Suits for a weekend of queer 1920’s and 30’s-style debauched fun. This year’s happening is from June 29 - July 2nd. Take a look at the website for a full listing of events, prices, and locations - the lineup this year sounds amazing, with a drag king trio, a Vaudeville-esque play, and a film about… a naughty librarian! I’m sold… see you there.

Hi everyone,

Pride Weekend is fully underway in Toronto and there is the usual corporate mess of advertisements. But at yesterday’s Dyke March, our queer community continued to make the march a political event. Everywhere I saw shirts that read “rosovaya” - which is “pink” in Russian and slang for lesbian. The back of the shirts read “Marching for those who can’t - Moscow 2006.”

At the end of May 2006 Moscow struggled to hold its first-ever Pride Parade. Although homosexuality was decriminalized in 1993 in Russia, there continues to be significant opposition to queer visibility and the queer community is largely underground. The city of Moscow banned the parade arguing that it would provoke violence and division in the city. Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said homosexual parades “may be acceptable for some kind of progressive, in some sense, countries in the West but it is absolutely unacceptable for Moscow, for Russia.”

Activists went ahead with their plans and attempted to lay flowers near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier outside the Kremlin. They were met by a nasty group of skinheads, Orthodox Christians and radical nationalists. Of course riot police busted everything up by targeting prominent gay and lesbian activists.

It was a powerful statement to see so many women walking yesterday in solidarity with Russian queers. All week I have been explaining to my heterosexual friends that the Dyke March is not a “parade” for me. (I was trying to convince them to attend parts of the Pride Week events other than the corporate Sunday march!) The Dyke March is not a show of pageantry and pomp for the world to see how glamorous and fantastic and over the top us homos can be (although of course we are ALL THOSE THINGS, but so, so much more.) For me, the Dyke March is an opportunity to be me, to be so totally me, to put my voice and my issues front and centre, and while it is empowering to have people stand aside for us, and watch us march by, the passion of this march is to be with so many different women, to take up a voice, and take up space - together.

In solidarity, p

Salon.com currently features an article about straight girls making out with each other to impress (and seduce) guys. The mostly-critical article points out the obvious problems with this trend, yet oddly enough, still glorifies it as a right-of-passage for the coolest of American high school students. The article is worth a read, especially because it gets inside the head of some sexually-uninhibited, heteroflexible girls.

(Annoyingly, to read the article, you first have to watch a little commercial. The one I was subject to instructed you on how to trick your husband into taking you to Las Vegas to go shopping. What joy.)