rogerhunting

so i am a lazy blogger who has let two weeks go by since south dakota took a big pointy crooked coat hanger to women's rights. sorry. the SD senate has banned abortion. all abortion. ALL ABORTION. even if your daddy raped you. really, my cooking up some vitriolic blasting curse about how violently criminal this decision is is a waste of time. i am spending that time writing myself post-it note reminders never to go to SD. Republican (obviously) representative Roger Hunt sponsored the bill, and i think Dan Savage should popularize the verb rogerhunting, the sport of ruining the lives of girls and women. and children. MacLean's reports that at least half of actual SD citizens disagree with the ban. Planned Parenthood in SD is going to challenge it. Hopefully Trojan and Allese will do their charity work for the year and air-drop ten zillion packages of their products onto the football fields of SD schools and colleges and every other open space, for that matter. The most humane way to reduce abortions being, of course, preventing unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

Abortions are down in NB, by the way, but that's because they shut down services at the Moncton hospital, not because sex is getting more foolproof.

an IWD treatise

this year i did not attend an international women's day (march 8) event...i have found since moving to ontario that the women's events are disappointing. on dec 6 at MAC, for instance, a team of self-promoting undergrads who collect old bathroom supplies to give to abused women in shelters did a "bubbly" powerpoint presentation called "rub a dub dub put your stuff in the tub". ahem. i doubt i need to describe the depraved depths of humiliation i felt watching these girls capitalize on the deaths of fourteen total non-victim, engineer martyrs to get some charity brownie points. i do not mourn by listening to teenagers congratulate themselves for giving women in hiding some old shampoo. nor do i mourn by listening to the male president of student council then read (ok, stumble) over a painfully inarticulate, uninformed, and totally self-obsessed diatribe. fine if you want to come and mourn, buddy, but damn you for rubbing your unearned podium power in my feminist face on my day to wear black.

last year on march 8 a girlfriend and i went to an IWD event at a latin resto in hamilton's cruddy downtown. it involved mostly heinous silent auction items, horrific food (which they ran out of- he he, woody allen), and salsa lessons from a full-buttoxed animator shouting "ladies, move like this to please your man". pleasing men with some hip jirations is great fun and all, but wasn't march 8 invented so i could take a day off from that?

this year i arrived at an irish pub coincidentally just as the IWD festivities there were winding down on the second floor. i could hear the gyno-stirrups-bad-joke routine going on up there from the front entranceway. then i saw the poster: hystrionic red roses and bold text reading "Comics! Psychics! Clowns! A Neil Diamond tribute!".

WHAT????!!!!!!!!!

Clowns? Psychics? And don't get me started on the irrelevance of neil diamond.

Yesterday CBC had a call-in about the demise of feminism, after interviewing some Carleton Uni students who won't call themselves feminists and claim not to identify with the movement. Older women and men called in to say "what is the matter with young women today they don't know their history they have no respect why are they afraid to call themselves feminists..." etc.

i couldn't get through to the call in line. maybe they could tell i was a young woman.

what i have witnessed in ontario is not the kind of feminism i grew up with, which consisted of (and still does back home): good food, ladies laughing about politics and each other's antics, dancing, singing whimsical protest songs, articulate speeches, leadership, sitting down with policymakers, breastfeeding in public, clarity about the issues that matter: war, hunger, poverty, violence, hate.

of course young women don't want to call themselves feminists here. if feminism is bathtub charity and cheesy salsa lessons and psychics, i want out too. i want to go home for my feminism, where the women knew each other, liked each other, liked themselves, liked to work hard doing real things, never went looking for praise but went looking for change, liked to feed (from the breast and the pot), like to sing and dance but, when with each other on iWD, not like they were in some madonna and brittany for-men-but-all-girl-on-girl-action porn video.

feminism in ontario is cheap and anonymous. last march 8 at that nasty restaurant, some sly little bitch stole our table when we went to the loo. does that sound like sisterhood to you?

i don't know if this big province ever had something richer like what we got at home. but i quit going to events i know i will hate. i don't want to join the movement here. it's competitive, infantile, and slightly looney.

while in ontario, my plan for feminism is to just do it, instead of "celebrating" it among strangers with strange ideas. anyway feminism not a thing to join anymore. feminism now is a verb. choose. choose what you do and the company you keep. keep choosing. that's the project now, to keep choosing, build it, until it is so damn possible to choose to leave the wrong man that every woman actually does it. until it is so damn easy to choose whether or not you want to get pregnant that every child is just beaming light they're so loved and well provided for. until it is so damn normal to choose only a job that pays women their worth that the pink ghetto is "manned" by robots instead. choose.

(choose not to go to neil diamond tributes. choose).

cmaj controversy

not a controversy, really. in december, the publisher, graham morris, pulled an article set for publication because he claimed the piece did not meet methodological standards. the article was the result of 12 women "mystery shopping" pharmacies in each province, to check up on how well the april 2005 national re-scheduling of Plan B was being opreationalized. no longer a prescription drug, emergency contraception was supposed to be easily accesible, simply ask a pharmacist for it and you shall receive. the "mystery shopping" women, investigating the situation like an reporter might (although certainly not undertaking the methodological gold standard of a randomized control trial, 'tis true), found in many cases to get the pills they were forced to first give a slew of personal information (where do you live? when did you have sex? etc...as if you would answer such questions to get condoms out of a washroom dispenser!). For the record, Plan B involves two pills, taken 12 hours apart, as soon as possible after a contraceptive slip-up. It rarely causes uncomfortable side effects and is not an abortificient, but prevents conception. now, the findings made by these ladies are VERY important. its one thing to be on a CMAJ-sponsored mission to get the freaking pills, and quite another to be a girl scared out of her panties that she has to face a white-coat and explain her sex sins under the glaring lights of shopper's the morning after. when morris said the article couldn't be published as it stood, he was protecting the pharmacists. the paternalistic question-asking has since come under ethical fire, and is banned in many provinces. then last month the CMA fired john hoey, editor in chief, innovative and fantastic cmaj leader, and critic of the december censorship. i was teary-eyed at hoey's good governance in december, and now i am devastated at his departure and the end of integrity at canada's best medical journal. The editorial board, including many of my academic mentors, has asked that hoey and anne marie todkill (the senior deputy editor, also admirable, also fired) be re-instated. why they would want to go back to this kind of treatment is worthy of some investigation, however, to join the petition to get hoey & todkill back and for editorial autonomy, go to:
http://www.chaps.ucalgary.ca/cmaj.htm