Tag: international women’s day

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Recommended reading

A weekend roundup post-International Women’s Day.

Charlotte Graham-McLay: Why the #MeToo reckoning has so much further to go (Noted)

I want mine to be the last generation of women who have to wait until they can afford to fight back – for me, around the age of 30, for some women, older or younger or never – and then grieve that we want our 20s back. I want mine back as a time where all that was considered, when assigning the jobs or opportunities or respect I wanted, was whether I was good enough.

Alison Flood: Romantic fiction in the age of Trump (Guardian)

“I woke up on 9 November and I was like, ‘I can’t write another one of these rich entitled impenetrable alphas. I just can’t,” says the New York Times bestselling author. “It was the story of that horrible impenetrable alpha evolving through love to be a fully formed human, which is a thing we do a lot in romance. And I just couldn’t see a way in my head that he would ultimately not be a Trump voter.”

(As good a time as any to plug my side project, Op Shop Romance: for everyone who wants to see how far I can roll my eyes at trashy romance tropes.)

Golriz Ghahraman: The CPTPP deal undermines Kiwis’ best interests (NewShub)

The CPTPP is blatantly not all that much about trade at all. The overwhelming majority sets out the extra rights of these elite foreign investors to be free from government regulation. The e-commerce chapter effectively prevents public oversight of this century’s data driven economy. They get to store their data outside NZ to get around the Privacy Act for example. They get a guarantee that NZ will abstain from regulating all unknown future technologies. Who does that benefit? And how is it necessary to trade?

Dorothy Ann Lee: Who was Mary Magdalene? Debunking the myth of the penitent prostitute (The Conversation)

The tradition of the penitent prostitute has persisted in the Western tradition. Institutions that cared for prostitutes from the 18th century onwards were called “Magdalenes” to encourage amendment of life in the women who took refuge in them. The word came into English as “maudlin”, meaning a tearful sentimentality. It is not a flattering description.

Serena Cherry: Women of metal, I salute you (Atom Smasher)

Couldn’t not include this one!

No one compares the handsomeness of our male guitarist against say, Bruce Dickinson, because they realize how ABSURD and IRRELEVANT that is. They manage to discuss the boys’ vastly different musical merits without turning it into some kind of sexy Top Trumps trade off. But no, screw my guitar playing and Simone’s singing, when it comes to the great variety of women in metal – what matters is who is the most attractive? The last thing I’d expect from a metalhead is such a shallow, reductionist attitude.

Here’s Svalbard’s “Unpaid Intern”. If it’s not your cup of tea musically (Mum) then check out Cherry’s companion essay about class struggle.

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Do Good Thursday: AUNTIES

New year, new energy, new good, concrete things you can do to change the world.

The pitch:

AUNTIES is a one-off publication written by women in Aotearoa about their experiences of political organising.

A collection of essays, interviews, visual art and poetry, AUNTIES channels the political power of women, offering rare insights into what it means to struggle and create change in the workplace, environment, local community and beyond.

Activists Nadia Abu-Shanab, Kassie Hartendorp and Ella Grace McPherson-Newton will be editing the project, which will feature the work of up to twenty writers and artists in a full colour, high quality publication. It will be launched on International Working Womens’ Day, March 8th, 2018.

This is an incredibly powerful project and it’s being organised by amazing people. They’re super close to their $5,000 goal – can you give them a little push to make it in their final week of fundraising?

Chip in to make AUNTIES happen here.

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Women of #nzpol Twitter roundup: International Women’s Day

Yesterday was International [Working] Women’s Day, and NZ Twitter celebrated it in appropriate fashion by multi-tasking the shit out of it.

We talked aaaaaaaaaaall the issues:

https://twitter.com/PCGoneRad/status/707013307119472640

We gave helpful advice:

We listened to badass music:

And here’s a shameless plug for my own Women in Metal playlist:

We wrote smart stuff:

http://thehandmirror.blogspot.co.nz/2016/03/this-international-womens-day-dont-miss.html

Our GIF game was thoroughly on point:

We bowed down to Kim Kardashian’s world-beating skill at exposing douchebag men and their faux-feminist misogyny with one selfie:

We posted pics:

We tried to bend light in different ways to end sexism:

https://twitter.com/Dovil/status/706929386537095168

We got all Parliamentary:

And some of us took one for the team by listening to Radio NZ’s unfortunately all-male Panel discuss the issues of the day:

And now, back to the other 365 days of the year where it’s all about the dudes.

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International (Working) Women’s Day

It’s hard to know what to write on this International (Working) Women’s Day. The issues facing women living under patriarchy remain pretty much what they always are: there’s a basic structural power imbalance, leveraged against women, against people of colour, against people with disabilities, against the working class, against GLBTQ people. This is reflected in how our labour is valued (what jobs we’re allowed to have, how much (less) we’ll be paid, how high we’re allowed to rise), in whether crimes against us are (not) taken seriously, in the fact that people from those groups live life on a higher difficulty setting than others.

The gender pay gap is in the spotlight again, both in terms of blatant women-getting-paid-less-than-men-for-the-same-job discrimination, and also the issue of women’s work, especially “nurturing” care work, being paid less than comparable “men’s” jobs. And when you break gender pay discrimination down by ethnicity, it gets a lot worse if you’re not Pākehā.

The government’s consistent undermining of work rights, refusal to even consider the concept of a living wage,  disprorportionately affects women. The focus by our Ministry of Women’s Affairs (and other groups like the National Council of Women) is still on getting more women onto boards, as though benefiting a few overwhelmingly white, well-off, educated, middle-aged cis women is going to trickle down some equality to the rest of us.

It’s definitely a problem though, given that in a survey of 1,500 large US corporations, there were more CEOs called John – or David – than there were women. With any name.

Women still carry the majority of the burden for housekeeping and child-rearing, which impacts on their careers and financial independence:

About 35 percent of New Zealand women work part-time because they also need to do housework and care for children and other dependents. Even though New Zealand men participate in domestic work more than men in other industrialised countries, women in New Zealand do more than double the unpaid house-work and care.

The issue of our corrections system imprisoning trans women in male prisons has gotten some long-overdue attention – and the violence which is doled out to people who stand against the mainstreaming of once-radical events.

It’s still probably going to take me longer to repay my student loan than my partner – even though his was about double mine when he finished uni.

One could go on and on listing the ways that sexism, and other types of prejudice, impact women’s lives. There’s a concerted campaign online to push women out of gaming and the tech industry. In this year’s Academy Awards there were no women nominated for directing, screenwriting, or cinematography, and no actors of colour. New Zealand’s abortion laws are still stuck in 1977. Our Minister for Women’s Affairs thinks that beauty pageants, which still primarily exist to reinforce narrow stereotypes about women’s value, are great ways to build women’s confidence (presumably so they can get on boards.) Our Prime Minister retracted his promise to apologise to a rape victim after he found out her politics were leftwing.

There has been some progress, absolutely; but there’s still a very long way to go before any of the most damaging effects of patriarchy can be considered cured, or even particularly dented.