Feminism is for everybody

An article in the Lancet earlier this month explained how Feminism is for everybody

The article quoted bell hooks, who said “to be ‘feminist’ in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.”

Women and men are held in a negative pattern of behaviour by the dominant paradigm of patriarchy. That pattern of behaviour is so normal, people can't perceive it until they become more mindful and aware. Even then, it is easy to slip back into unconsciousness and the same pattern of behaviour. There is a concept that 'fish can't see water' and that applies to us humans too and the dominant patriarchal paradigm. Not only is it hard to perceive without education and questionning, some people will argue for their limitations and to maintain their inability to perceive the socially transmitted invisible structures that contain and shape us.  Neither women nor men can truly be all they are capable of being until they throw off the shackles of sexist role patterns and become aware of the subliminal messages that support and cultivate the behaviours that enable dominantion and suppression.

This video, shared on Twitter this morning, has been watched by 4.48 million people across the world and demonstrates all too clearly how 'normal' violence against women is. The comments are enlightening. I encourage you to read them and think about why bell hooks wrote about feminism in the way she did and how it essential for everybody.

Childbirth is an area where women are even more vulnerable than usual. In pregnancy, women need to be cared for and supported as their mind/bodies are fully engaged in growing the next generation. Women need a safe environment for their bodies to work well.  However, pregnancy is a time when domestic violence can erupt for the first time or worsen. Not only are women damaged and murdered by violence in the home, living with violence irreparably damages children. The immediate and long-term consequences on children of living  with violence is becoming more understood and increasingly talked about in the media.

There is also recognition that too many women's wants, needs and desires for birthing their babies are ignored and dismissed by the people working in the system.  More and more women are emerging from childbirth shattered, their belief in themselves torn to shreds. A term used to describe this phenomenon is 'obstetric violence'.  Many health care professionals are horrified by that term, claiming that they care about women and their babies and their work is designed to keep the woman and her baby safe. The fact that so many women feel damaged by the very system that has been created to keep them safe means we have a problem - the question is, has the disrespect and invisible negative pattern of behaviour that signals the patriarchal paradigm caused a blindspot in the health sytem's perspective?  Women want to birth normally and need to have the support to do it.  WHO is recommending that labour,if everyone is well  and healthy, to be enabled to progress at it's own pace. Despite this call for change, intervention rates are increasing. A new book by a gastroenterologist from Cork provides a scathing attack on modern medicine, calling it “an industrialised culture of excess” and a threat to health". Certainly, along with the way women feel following childbirth, the distress and rate of death by suicide in the medical profession indicates that things need to change. Some are calling for a Royal Commission into Obsetric Care in Australia - perhaps the time has come to look deeply, with fresh eyes, at what we are doing to women and babies during childbearing.

After 68 women were murdered last year in Australia, the majority murdered by someone they loved, a northern rivers' musician, Ilona Harker, herself a survior of domestic violence experienced as a child, gathered other musicians from around the area to create a moving tribute to the women who had been murdered and to end violence against women, using Valentine's Day as the framework.

Ilona called to all of us to make a difference:

 "I would also like people to feel compelled to speak up when they see micro-aggression acts or anyone who has any hate speech towards women or children.

"And I'd really like men to stand up because without men we're not going to change this."

It's time for a new normal. As bell hooks wrote so compellingly, if we "want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.”  then feminism is for everybody.


https://twitter.com/JIMINSPROMlSE/status/1096449763111854080

Symbols, power and woman's place in the world

I always enjoy Maria Popover's links and articles. Her Blog has fascinating and often obscure articles which are relevant to my interests. I follow Maria on Twitter  - her twitter name is @brainpicker

So it was with great interest that I followed this link

 

to YouTube to see Symmetry, a short vimeo film by Radiolab that Maria said "explores the dualities of human existence, best short film you'll see all week".

 

The film is very clever - it juxaposes images concerning the dualities of existence to explore

"What the origin of the universe has to do with gender identity, binary parallels and anatomy"

I felt disturbed by the juxtaposition of hot chips and tomato sauce, pepsi and coke, popcorn and movies as typical of life on this beautiful planet of ours, but this following image really bothered me

Why does that bother me?

Positioning these images as the gender divide and to represent masculinity and feminity bothers me because of the inclusion of the disabled sign with the woman figure.

Maria says that:

"Symmetry is a mesmerizing split-screen short film exploring the poetic parallels and contrasts of our world — birth and death, heart and brain, masculinity and femininity, all many more of humanity’s fundamental dualities. It’s the best thing you’ll watch all week, we promise"

Given the producers and Maria are cluey in regards to the messages we receive from the visual stimuli around us, it is hard to believe that they didn’t recognise the way this image can subliminally erode women’s sense of self and personal power. Perhaps they didn’t ‘see’ the message the film is sending because that view of women is 'normal' and that makes it all the more fascinating and concerning.

Maria explains that:

"The film was inspired by Radiolab’s Desperately Seeking Symmetry episode, which examines how symmetry and its pursuit shape the core of our existence, from the origins of the universe to what we see when we look in the mirror"

Is that how you see yourself when you look in the mirror?

Here's the film so you can  make up your own mind

Read more: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/04/20/radiolab-symmetry/#ixzz1K7q855ff

Symmetry from Everynone on Vimeo.


Those of us who are birth workers are very aware of the way that in western culture at least, women are being progressively disabled to birth normally. Women are embodying the messages that birth is something to be medicated... avoided... that being delivered surgically is preferable and 'safer for the baby' even though it is certainly not.

Our connection to 'nature' is eroding and our birth DNA, our wild side, is getting switched off and put under the lock and key of medicalisation.

The grunting, groaning, sweating, swearing, movement and effort associated with giving birth is increasingly perceived as unbefitting modern women. Birth is now sanitised with pretty delivery room decorations and epidurals on demand. I've noticed many partners and other family members feel relieved when the woman is neatly in bed, unable to move and 'painfree' for labour. The fact that they can't push or move and end up with baby extractions either with abdominal or perineal cuts doesn't seem to be an issue. The disablity accompanying the pain and difficulty moving for some time after the baby extraction doesn't seem a problem for anyone either. '

We have to ask what it is about the birth process that causes all this angst about 'pain' in labour. That's probably a topic for another time.

Back to the images in this short film and what they represent.  My perception is that the unconscious coupling of a woman with the disabled sign positioned as symmetrical with the male symbol is a striking indicator of how women are culturally constructed as disabled in our world. 

The fact that the message is subliminal and that neither the producers, nor those who understand subliminal marketing and neuroscience recognised the message makes it even more powerful and dangerous to women's sense of self, power and place in the world.

And then there is the message about what it means to be female in western society fostered by the likes of  the ubiquitous Child Beauty Pageants.  As  Heidi Davoren, in her column Dirty Laundry for Life & Style section of the Brisbane Times wrote:

"Shame on us as a society that our daughters are groomed into submission, objectification and sexualisation at such a tender age, in the name of entertainment. In fact, in the name of ‘building self-esteem’."

The rampant sexualisation of girls is another powerful and dangerous threat to women's sense of self, power and place in the world.

Power and Agency in Childbirth: Women’s relationships with obstetricians.

Trust, Power and Agency in Childbirth: Women’s relationships with obstetricians.

This great article by Monica Campo, a feminist sociologist and scholar, needs to be shared. Monica is doing her PhD at La Trobe University, in Victoria, and this article is part of her work for her PhD. The article is published online at Outskirts: Feminism along the Edge. Monica explains the content of this article this way:

"This paper has a twofold argument: that women participating in this study enter into a relationship of trust with their obstetrician based both on their class positioning and their belief and entrenchment within the hegemonic biomedical model of birth; and that their confidence and trust in their own ability to birth without medical expertise is subtly eroded in the medical encounter as well as through cultural fears surrounding birth. I use this evidence to make a wider claim regarding the limits of choice and agency within the obstetric encounter. Women in medical systems of maternity care are not ‘passive dupes’ of obstetric hegemony but their autonomy is nonetheless constrained by their relationship with their obstetrician and an increasing normalisation of medical birth".