Data for indicators of women’s leadership in Asia, though limited, show that the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand are consistently among the top performers. With the addition of economic and occupational parameters – such as women in senior management positions, promotion rates, remuneration, and wage equality – these countries are joined by Singapore, Mongolia, Thailand, and Malaysia.
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"Power to Asia's Women" by Vishakha N. Desai and Astrid S. Tuminez | Project Syndicate - 0 views
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Some of the Asian economies with the highest human development rankings, such as Japan and South Korea, are among the worst in terms of women in senior management, wage equality, remuneration, and political empowerment. Singapore and Hong Kong, too, display significant gender gaps in leadership, despite high human development.
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few women in Asia make it to the top. Social norms undervalue girls and women, with sex-selection abortions resulting in an estimated 1.3 million girls per year not being born in China and India alone.
CommentsStill, women have benefited from Asia's economic development. According to the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2011, rising prosperity has narrowed gender inequality in many countries. Women are making progress in health, education, economic opportunity, and political empowerment, which they can leverage for future leadership.
Victim Feminism Speaks! « Guardian Watch - 0 views
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I responded to this horrendous paragraph in Moore’s piece:
‘Still, we all get bamboozled with the choices women now have. Despite everyday stories of violence and abuse against women, we are now to refer to prostitution as “sex work”. I still await the dinner party where middle-class parents tell me: “Tom is doing his law conversion but even though Charlotte hasn’t done her Sats she already says she want to do sex work! We always knew she was entrepreneurial.” (my emphasis).
I said:
‘as a woman who refuses the role of ‘victim’ I find this article insulting.
How can I assert my agency with people like Ms Moore demanding that I fit into the ‘poor little victim’ box like a good little girl?
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feminists on twitter silenced men critics, with the witty hashtag #whatabouttehmenz . But as Mark Simpson wrote in his article about misandry being the acceptable prejudice, this is a very sexist tactic:
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It’s a rather telling phrase because it tries to project the childishness of the people deploying it against the ones they want to shut up. Ironically, it also seems to depend on the ‘patriarchal’ notion of shaming the whining boy who doesn’t just sup it up ‘like a man’.’
Singapore Feminism: Fertility and Transnational Immigration « Women Suffrage ... - 0 views
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Only recently have Singapore's feminists championed domestic workers. Considerable media attention on abusive working conditions has prompted them, as in Canada, to connect racism, disadvantaged international domestic workers, and women's disproportionate responsibility for caregiving. Protest is led by the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) - a nationally recognized women's organization, which since its formation in 1985 has actively rallied for gender equality in education, marriage, employment and reproductive rights. AWARE aligns itself closely with Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), a non-governmental organization campaigning for the 'Day Off campaign' aimed at encouraging employers to voluntarily give domestic workers a day off a week ("Day Off", 2011). TWC2 has also joined with the National Committee of UNIFEM Singapore and the Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economic (HUMO) to demand government remedy. Their demands have brought occasional redress. On March 6th, 2012, a new law required all employers to give their foreign domestic workers a day off per week starting January 1, 2013 (Tan 2012). Feminists will need to monitor its impact.
Fertility and immigration in Singapore as elsewhere have always been connected to nation-building. They simultaneously raise questions about women's rights and the relations among different groups of women. Today the feminist movement in this island-nation has begun to address such concerns and join similar protests across the region and the world.
Hen: Sweden's new gender neutral pronoun causes controversy. - Slate Magazine - 0 views
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Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children's interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers. One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys "gender-coded" them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys. Another preschool removed "free playtime" from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely "stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying." And so every detail of children's interactions gets micromanaged by concerned adults, who end up problematizing minute aspects of children's lives, from how they form friendships to what games they play and what songs they sing.
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. In a recent interview for Vice magazine, Jan Guillou, one of Sweden's most well-known authors, referred to proponents of hen as "feminist activists who want to destroy our language." Other critics believe it can be psychologically and socially damaging, especially for children. Elise Claeson, a columnist and a former equality expert at the Swedish Confederation of Professions, has said that young children can become confused by the suggestion that there is a third, "in-between" gender at a time when their brains and bodies are developing. Adults should not interrupt children's discovery of their gender and sexuality, argues Claeson. She told the Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, that "gender ideologues" have managed to change the curriculum to establish that schools should actively counter gender roles.
Feminists Say Horrible, Horrible Things « Guardian Watch - 1 views
Barbara Kay: Women are not always the 'gentler sex' | Full Comment | National Post - 0 views
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McGill professor of Social Work Myriam Denov, who did her Phd thesis on female sex offenders, notes, as recently as 1984, a study proclaimed that “pedophilia does not exist at all in women.”
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According to a 2004 U.S. Department of Education mass study of university students, 57% of students reporting child sexual abuse cited a male offender, and 42% reported a female offender. Interestingly, 65% of the survivors of female abuse who opened up to a therapist, doctor or other professional were not believed on their first disclosure. Overall, 86% of those who tried to tell anyone at all about their experience were not believed.
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According to a 1996 report from the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN), about 25% of child sexual abuse is committed by women, but that figure may be low, because survivors are far more conflicted and shamed in admitting abuse by their mothers than by fathers.
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Most rapists were subjected to some form of sexual abuse in childhood. A startling amount is perpetrated by females. Peer-reviewed studies conclude that between 60-80% of "rapists, sex offenders and sexually aggressive men" were sexually abused by a female.
Miss Representation: A Review | the kent ridge common - 0 views
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the thing that unsettles me most about Miss Representation is its glaring lack of sufficient representation for women of color, women with disabilities, and women of less privilege than the well-to-do upper-middle class CEOs, politicians, and celebrities that we see on screen. As professors and students alike pointed out in the panel discussion after the film, one can’t help but wonder if this approach is entirely too self-defeating. While the film’s aim is to point out the misrepresentation of women in the media, does it misrepresent women in the process of doing so?
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The staggering statistics about how much of the media industry is owned and controlled by men and how lacking the industry is in gender equality is equally shocking.
Missing From Asia's Boardrooms: Women - Southeast Asia Real Time - WSJ - 0 views
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“It is not just about the quotas, but the diversity within those quotas — it isn’t just about having three women, but women from different backgrounds who can contribute different things,” said Ms. Crewes, whose organization, P&G, employs a chief diversity officer to ensure a better distribution of different nationalities, races and gender within the company.
Do Today's Women Have Too Many Choices? | Psychology Today - 0 views
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Psychologist Barry Schwartz has written of “the paradox of choice.” His research has shown that too many choices can leave us confused and depressed, actually undermining our ability to choose wisely (Schwartz, 2004).
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Journalism professor Barbara Kelley noticed a surprising trend among her women students: they were bright, successful, highly motivated-and terribly confused. Raised with great expectations by parents who told them they could do anything, they worked hard, earned top grades, polished their résumés, began impressive careers, then collapsed in metaphysical uncertainty, anxious and overwhelmed.
Unnatural Selection? « Quiet Riot Girl - 0 views
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In the case of the backlash against Cynthia Nixon, it is clear to me that (usually white middle class and often male) gays are outraged that their worldview and their sense of self, and how they were born this way is not being prioritised. If sexuality is, to some degree, a choice, as Cynthia says it is for her, (note she is not generalising about other people), then gays lose some of their ‘victim status’ as these poor, beleagured people who are forced to live under the shadow of the heterosexual dominant group.
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I oppose 'strategic essentialism' because I think it fails in its own goal of uniting 'oppressed' groups who have a common 'enemy' or oppressor. It serves to privilege (yes I can use that word too) one group's identity and needs over other, less powerful ones.
The first sexual revolution: lust and liberty in the 18th century - 0 views
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the first sexual revolution can be traced in some of the greatest works of literature, art and philosophy ever produced – the novels of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen, the pictures of Reynolds and Hogarth, the writings of Adam Smith, David Hume and John Stuart Mill. And it was played out in the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary men and women, otherwise unnoticed by history, whose trials and punishments for illicit sex are preserved in unpublished judicial records. Most startling of all were my discoveries of private writings, such as the diary of the randy Dutch embassy clerk Lodewijk van der Saan, posted to London in the 1690s; the emotional letters sent to newspapers by countless hopeful and disappointed lovers; and the piles of manuscripts about sexual freedom composed by the great philosopher Jeremy Bentham but left unpublished, to this day, by his literary executors. Once noticed, the effects of this revolution in attitudes and behaviour can be seen everywhere when looking at the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. It was one of the key shifts from the pre-modern to the modern world.
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The law codes of the Anglo-Saxon kings of England treated women as chattels, but they also forbade married men to fornicate with their slaves, and ordered that adulteresses be publicly disgraced, lose their goods and have their ears and noses cut off. Such severity reflected the Christian church's view of sex as a dangerously polluting force, as well as the patriarchal commonplace that women were more lustful than men and liable to lead them astray.
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During the 17th century this figure had been extremely low: in 1650 only about 1% of all births in England were illegitimate. But by 1800, almost 40% of brides came to the altar pregnant, and about a quarter of all first-born children were illegitimate. It was to be a permanent change in behaviour.
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Short People « Quiet Riot Girl - 0 views
Real Fags Join The Priesthood? « Quiet Riot Girl - 0 views
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using hypothetical examples of girls being abused saying if it was girls being 'sexually abused' by men priests, people would come up with spurious justifications for it. And yet, the main reason this sexual abuse 'scandal' in the priesthood has been newsworthy is that the men doing the 'abuse' got away with it for years and years. It's classic oppression olympics with girls and women always winning the gold victim status medal, even when they are made up examples!
How my mother's fanatical feminist views tore us apart, by the daughter of The Color Pu... - 0 views
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Feminism has much to answer for denigrating men and encouraging women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families.
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while she has taken care of daughters all over the world and is hugely revered for her public work and service, my childhood tells a very different story. I came very low down in her priorities - after work, political integrity, self-fulfilment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.
My mother would always do what she wanted - for example taking off to Greece for two months in the summer, leaving me with relatives when I was a teenager. Is that independent, or just plain selfish?
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When I was beaten up at school - accused of being a snob because I had lighter skin than my black classmates - I always told my mother that everything was fine, that I had won the fight. I didn't want to worry her.
But the truth was I was very lonely and, with my mother's knowledge, started having sex at 13. I guess it was a relief for my mother as it meant I was less demanding. And she felt that being sexually active was empowering for me because it meant I was in control of my body.
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Feminism's Big Daddy Syndrome « Guardian Watch - 0 views
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In a piece that states how women are diagnosed with and treated for mental health problems in greater numbers than men, she ‘blames’ theorists such as Freud for pathologising women as ‘hysterical’:
‘Sigmund Freud’s notion of penis envy. The Austrian psychiatrist claimed that women are batshit because, well, they just aren’t men. The result? Little girls would all grow up to become masochists with daddy complexes. The proof, supposedly, was rooted in the “phallic” way they liked to plait hair’.
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Apart from the complete misunderstanding of Freud, and later Foucault, (you know, Freud doesn’t exactly present men as without their problems. Oedipus, masochism, perversion, neuroses- these are not merely attributed to women by Freud), the writer is doing exactly what she says Freud did. She is giving women a ‘Big Bad Daddy’ to have a complex about – male dominated medicine and psychiatry, and the big bad wolf of ‘rape culture’.
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this is a reversion to 1970s victim feminism
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Lay off men, Lessing tells feminists | UK news | The Guardian - 0 views
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"I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men.
"You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives."
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"It has become a kind of religion that you can't criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not.
"It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.
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The novelist Doris Lessing yesterday claimed that men were the new silent victims in the sex war, "continually demeaned and insulted" by women without a whimper of protest.
Lessing, who became a feminist icon with the books The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, said a "lazy and insidious" culture had taken hold within feminism that revelled in flailing men.
Balderdash: Women reading, Theory, [Selective] Reflexivity and Forced Readings - 0 views
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I agree with Gayatn Spivak that our marginality is important—but there is very little room in the margins when that space has been claimed by Marxists and theorists of all stripes. With all this jostling in the margins, who is in the center?...
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Shari Benstock challenges us: “Feminist criticism must be willing to pose the question of the differences within women’s writing. . . . Feminist criticism must be a radical critique not only of women’s writing but of women’s critical writing.” She calls for us to “inscribe the authority of our own experience” (147) and to question the assumptions of that authority. I am not sure that Shari Benstock realizes how dangerous this project can be. My own career began with such critiques of feminist criticism and I have concluded that years of joblessness were a direct result of that practice.’ Old girl networks exist; hierarchy is imposed and some feminist journals have “better” reputations than others. Star feminist critics perform their acts on platforms all over the country. The only difference is that we like what they have to say, and fall asleep less easily than at a male critic’s lecture. One feminist critic says that she would not have the “hubris” to criticize Gilbert and Gubar, It is not hubris but a pledge to our collective future as practicing critics to point out differences in theory and practice. I am sure that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar would be the first to insist that such sisterly criticisms of their work be offered, for they continue to write, to grow, and to change. If feminist criticism has taught us anything, it has taught us to question authority, each other’s as well as our oppressors’. There are some cases in which theorists ignore scholarship at their peril.
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I suspect it emerges from a flaw in the very project of critical theory. When Marxism, semiotics and the rest burst on the academic scene in the 1960s and ‘70s, they were seen above all as ways to probe beneath the sur- face of reality. The idea was always to unmask the hidden structures of power, dominance, and exploitation that lay below even the most mundane and ordinary aspects of daily life. Certainly such things are there to be found. But if this is all one is looking for, one soon ends up with a rather jaundiced picture of social reality. The overall effect of reading through this literature is remarkably bleak; one is left with the almost Gnostic feeling of a fallen world, in which every aspect of human life is threaded with violence and domination.9 Critical theory thus ended up sabotaging his own best in- tentions, making power and domination so fundamental to the very nature of social reality that it became impossible to imagine a world without it. Be- cause if one can’t, then criticism rather loses its point. Before long, one had figures like Foucault or Baudrillard arguing that resistance is futile (or at least, that organized political resistance is futile), that power is simply the basic constituent of everything, and often enough, that there is no way out of a totalizing system, and that we should just learn to accept it with a cer- tain ironic detachment. And if everything is equally corrupt, then pretty much anything could be open for redemption.10 Why not, say, those creative and slightly offbeat forms of mass consumption favored by upper-middle class academics?
Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, page 30
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It is by the use of obscurantist language and labelling that formalist critics batter the text and bury it. They assert their egos and insult their own readers by making them feel ignorant. Much as they criticize anti-intellectual bourgeois society, they add to the contempt for art and thought by alienating readers even further. Their jargon, the hieroglyphics of a self-appointed priesthood, makes reading seem far more difficult than it is. In an age of declining literacy, it seems suicidal for the supposed champions of arts and letters to attack and incapacitate readers.
