Call for Submissions: Canadian Women’s Feminist Exhibit

Deadline for Proposals: January 1st, 2008 Any mediums accepted.
(installation,interdisciplinary and site specifif art encouraged.
Also, painting, sculpture, craft…)

The idea of the exhibit is for women to take up as much space as possible, a feminist blanketing across Canada of strong women’s art.

Please include: your cv, bio,description of project, paragraph of feminist perspective, photo of artwork, 10 images of your art on disc including the proposed exhibit.

Please Mail submissions to:

Feminist Exhibit
28 Osborne Drive Eastern Passage,
Nova Scotia B3G1H2.

It’s that time of year again - the looking-around time. The time when everyone is looking around for a new person to cuddle with in the winter, a new passion to fill the coming frozen hours, that one new song that perfectly captures the new chill in the air and the strange and familiar smell of leaves on the ground.

This is where Merrill Garbus comes in. Known on the stage as tUnE-YaRdS, she is a one-woman dynamo with a ukelele and sampled beats from an mp3 recorder. Don’t mistake her lo-fi setup for minimalism, though - this woman’s sound is much, much larger than life. Her lyrics, some of the most original I’ve heard, go from gentle to creepy and back again so quickly you barely notice, like being pinched on the butt at a party by someone who looks like a cute, shy librarian, and you go “Did that actually happen?” and you’re secretly really glad it did.

Recommended tracks: When You Tell The Lions That You Love Them So, and Melting, which was recorded live on a certain someone’s radio show. Ahem. There’s a good interview with tUnE-YaRdS here, courtesy of the good folks at the excellent Said The Gramophone, where she also talks about her puppet show Fat Kid Opera.

If you want to keep the chills going, check out Taki Pejzaz by California’s Faun Fables. Singer Dawn McCarthy has one of the most amazing voices of all time, and this song will take you places. I’m not telling which ones. Go listen.

I can’t even believe this. In New York, Tri-Valley High School students are not allowed to carry bags or purses at school - unless they have their periods. If they do have a purse, it’s possible a security guard will ask them if they’re menstruating:

Samantha Martin, 14, had a small purse with her that day.

That’s why the security guard, ex-Monticello cop Mike Bunce, asked her The Question.

She says he told her she couldn’t have a purse unless she had her period. Then he asked, “Do you have your period?”

Unbelievable. Thankfully, the girls aren’t taking this kind of harrassment lightly:

Girls have worn tampons on their clothes in protest, and purses made out of tampon boxes. Some boys wore maxi-pads stuck to their shirts in support.

After hearing that someone might have been suspended for the protest, freshman Hannah Lindquist, 14, went to talk to Worden. She wore her protest necklace, an OB tampon box on a piece of yarn. She said Worden confiscated it, talked to her about the code of conduct and the backpack rule — and told her she was now “part of the problem.”

School safety (both of the concealed weapons and “you could trip over a bag” variety) has been cited as the reason behing bag bans and a Sept. 19 “bag sweep” that staff performed. Although not a specific school rule, the rumor was that it was okay to carry a purse if you were menstruating - were they checking bags to see if the girls actually had tampons and pads?

Kim Martin, Samantha’s mom, said she feels like the district is calling her daughter a liar and backing Bunce.

“I don’t want him to be able to talk to girls like that,” she said. “They’re kids, but they’re still citizens. They have rights.”

via Feministing

While television news broadcasts and pundit shows have been asking for months now if the United States is ready for President Hillary Clinton, another province of Televisionland has been busy conjuring up fictional visions of what a female leader of the free world would look like.

Or perhaps “busy” isn’t quite the right word; even in the fictional universes of the small screen, female presidents seem to be few and far between. Even so, the past several years have brought television viewers several prominent Madam Presidents, and is set to do so again in January. Will life imitate art in 2008, and if so, what should we expect? A quick review of television leaders may give us some clues.

(more inside…)

Slate.com has an interesting piece regarding problematic age of consent laws in the United States. You might have heard that this week notorious polygamist leader Warren Jeffs was finally convicted as an accomplice to rape for orchestrating a sexually coercive marriage between a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin. Jeffs, who is hailed by his followers as a “prophet,” now faces life in prison, and for many people who have known about how his sect has exploited and abused young girls for many years, the verdict is a welcome one.

There is, however, another side of the age on consent law coin. During the last century countries have been raising and standardizing age of consent laws, meaning that people like Warren Jeffs fall in the same legal category as people like Generlow Wilson:

In Georgia, 21-year-old Genarlow Wilson is serving a mandatory 10-year jail sentence for aggravated child molestation. His crime: When he was 17, he had (consensual) oral sex with a 15-year-old girl.

I think you will agree with me that Wilson’s crime does not fall in the same catagory as Jeffs. As Slate rather unpoetically puts it “Horny teenagers are being thrown in with pedophiles.”

Some other examples I found: A seventeen-year-old girl in River Falls, Wisconsin was arrested for having consensual sex with her 15-year-old boyfriend and charged with the sexual assault of a child. An 18-year-old boy in Milton, Florida had consensual sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend, was arrested and charged with sexual assault, and spent a year in jail. Now he has to register as a sex offender.

These cases seem more to me like punishing teenagers for having sex than protecting teenagers from sexual assault and exploitation. They’re also part of a broader hypocricy:

States consider it a crime for adults to have sex with minors, but they allow kids as young as 12 to get married with parental and sometime judicial permission.

That means that a 15-year-old girl can’t engage in oral sex with her 17-year-old boyfriend, but in some states, a 30-year-old man can marry a 12-year-old girl with her parents’ permission? (more inside…)

As of yesterday, the Canadian Cancer Society is no longer recommending routine self breast examinations as a reliable way to detect breast cancer. Heather Logan, director of Cancer Control Policy and Information for the Canadian Cancer Society stated that mammography and clinical breast examinations done by a doctor are now recommended instead of monthly self exams:

“There is no evidence that doing a rigorous, systematic BSE will lower breast cancer death rates. The general transition is toward general breast health awareness where you are aware of normal breast tissue, the feel and look, and you can detect changes and report them to your doctor,” Logan said.

Taking one look at the comments section of the CTV.ca news posting on this story will give you an idea of how mixed the reaction has been to this development. Many women are shocked that after years of being encouraged to do monthly BSEs the new message is “never mind.” The issue is complex. This from the Vancouver Sun:

Logan said evidence now shows that technique may have resulted in more harm than good, in that many women reported feeling guilty or stressed by not sticking to the exact schedule, or missing monthly exams.

The technique also may have given women a false sense of security that kept them from having mammograms or a clinical exam by a professional health care worker.

“That’s definitely not the message we need to be sending women,” Logan said.

Many women are coming forward to state that they discovered their own breast cancer by doing a BSE and that they believe their cancer would not have been detected soon enough without the monthy self-exam.

I’m curious to know what readers think about the sudden message shift and if you think that this is a positive step in women’s health or that it could instead put more women at risk?

If you’ve passed a newsstand recently, you’ve likely come across the controversial cover story in (and image on) the latest issue of Macleans Magazine. It’s easy to see why a piece titled “How George Bush Became the New Saddam” could push some buttons, especially down south, but what is perhaps more interesting is what is being revealed in the realm of Canadian/American relations as a result.

D.B. Scott, who has been “watching the blogosphere for comments about the Maclean’s cover” made this observation on his Canadian Magazines blog today:

…most have not even the foggiest notion about what life is like in Canada, hence their bizarre explanations for these people north of the border satirizing their president.

His example? Scott provides this gem of a quote from Maffers Weblog:

Political humor is rampant in Canadian culture, as many Canadian children are raised on peasant vision, or basic cable, which offers CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), and not a whole lot else. CBC, being a nationally owned station, is understandably lacking in quality programming, but in one area they have shined for years; the field of Political humor… children of all ages have been bombarded with savvy (or not) political whit (sic), when they are not watching hockey that is.

Inspired by Scott’s interest in the American reaction to this piece, I went looking for commentary and actually found quite a postive response, including this comment:

I applaud the Canadians. They’ve long seen the way things are! Even though they are America’s Hat.

The headline for this Guardian opinion piece (‘Feminism’s rape fallacy’) had me feeling a little nervous as I clicked over, but the stand first made me warm a little: “Imperfect though they may be, courts must retain presumption of innocence in rape cases.” Well yeah, of course.

Unfortunately, things deteriorate from there. There’s a bit in the middle that got to me in particular.

Yet, why shouldn’t women be encouraged to think twice before visiting footballers’ hotel rooms late at night? Why shouldn’t they be advised that to get themselves into a drunken stupor in the company of a frisky male could carry risks?

Do we really think women are not warned enough about protecting their personal safety? Where has this guy been? Just about all society does is remind us to be careful. CBC reports on the recent rape cases at York University were mostly interviews with other women in residence swearing up and down that they would lock their doors more carefully from now on. We’re not supposed to walk on our own, talk back to harassment, close the office door when we’re talking to a male teacher, leave our drinks unattended, or even drink. The message comes through, loud and clear.

With that out of the way, is it so preposterous to look into why rape conviction rates are so low? When I was in Scotland I kept hearing that the conviction rates there were nearly the lowest in the Western world. (And you can imagine what that sort of publicity does to the number of rapes reported to begin with.) Surely some of the gap could be closed.

For that matter, what are Canada’s rape conviction rates? In a half hour online I didn’t come up with any consistent numbers. Anyone know more about this than me?

Every time I hear about Giselle Webber, she just gets better and better.

From an interview in Nightlife Magazine:

Nightlife: How does your feminist side come to terms with the fact that you’ve become a rock and roll sex symbol?
Giselle Webber: When I’m on stage, I try to emulate my rock heroes who throw their bodies down, freak out with their guitars and shake and scream. Because I have boobs that jiggle and an ass, it’s considered sexy. […] If a guy was doing the same thing, he’d just look like a tough rocker dude onstage. When a girl does it, it’s instantly porno because the only other time you see a girl on the stage freaking out like that is in a strip club. It’s twisted, women are so completely sexualized whereas I’m just trying to do some cool rock moves and have some presence.

She’s not the first person to point out the double standard, but it’s shockingly rare to see it in print. Hats off to her, and to Nightlife for daring to broach the f-word in an interview!