What marks a feminist?

[NOTE: I'M LEAVING THIS UP FOR NOW, BUT I'M INTENDING TO MODIFY IT SLIGHTLY - LARGELY BECAUSE I GOT SIDETRACKED AND CONVEYED SLIGHTLY THE WRONG MESSAGE. It's posted on Feministing somewhere, where someone's comment alerted me to the fact that I was, in terms of my intended message, talking bollocks.]

There are several saying out there which talk about how a true friend will support you through the hard times as well as the good, stick by you even when they disagree with you, that sort of thing. I've been drafting a couple of posts and they got me thinking about some feminist acts I've encountered recently:

• On the news last night, I saw Zahra Rahnavard, wife to the Iranian presidential candidate and reformist Mir-Hossein Mousavi, stating her view that women should be allowed to choose what they wear without fear of recrimination by people like the current morality police. She herself was fully covered, with not a hair visible, though many of Mousavi's supporters are less strict about their headscarves.
  
• I have a few devoutly Christian friends who would never terminate a pregnancy unless their lives were at risk, but have no qualms with other women choosing otherwise.
• Feminists all over the place decide not to remove their body hair as both a political statement and personal preference, but don't chastise other feminists when they choose to be clean-shaven.
• Stay-at-home mothers are often uncritical of the decision of other mothers to join the workforce. Don't let the Daily Mail fool you, these women aren't in the minority.
  

It's all very well to be a feminist, or to follow any political or religious movement because it happens to agree with your own personal choices. But sometimes I just feel that the true feminists among us are those who, regardless of their own beliefs and practices, are willing to trust other women to make their own decisions in life without simultaneously making judgements and demoting them as 'less good' because of their choices. Opposing all attempts to restrict our freedoms, even if you yourself may never make use of them, preferring to spread honest information to allow others to make up their minds as you did rather than force everyone to follow your own line of thought. Allowing women to make truly free decisions.
In essence, supporting every woman's right to choose - in ALL areas of her life.

What would YOU define as truly feminist?

Full post tomorrow

But for now, a memento from Monday's protest in Glasgow and a message to all the anti-choicers out there:

Lord wants virgin nurses or no nurses

Well, not quite, but Lord Mancroft is clearly shocked that the nurses looking after him have sex.

Lord Mancroft told the House of Lords that he was treated at the hospital in 2007, and described the nurses as "grubby and drunken".

"The nurses that looked after me were mostly grubby. We're talking about dirty fingernails, slipshod, lazy."

The hospital said it had received no complaint but would be contacting Lord Mancroft to discuss the matter.

Yes, nurses should be held to high standards, should take care of their appearance and personal hygiene as a fundamental requirement of working with hospital patients. And DRUNKEN, you say? They were drinking on the job? They should be sacked!
Oh, no. Nothing so serious. Here's what he ACTUALLY means.

"It's a miracle I'm still alive. But worst of all my Lords they were drunken and promiscuous."

"How do I know that? Because if you're a patient and you're lying in a bed, and you're being nursed from either side, they talk across you as if you're not there.

"So I know exactly what they got up to the night before, and how much they drank, and I know exactly what they were planning to do the next night, and I can tell you, it's pretty horrifying."

Emphasis mine.
Nurses shouldn't act like the patient isn't there and shouldn't gab about their personal lives whilst caring for patients, but come ON! WORST OF ALL? Not the lack of hygiene, the careless attitudes, the laziness - no, these nurses DRINK! and have SEX!!! like MEN do sometimes!!!!!!!!! Pass the bleeding smelling salts, I'm not prepared to be cared for by human beings with lives outside their work. If I'm not going to be nursed by teetotal virgin angels that have no vaginas, or at the very least women who pretend to be just like this, I'd rather not be cared for at all.

That's what Mancroft's insinuating, perhaps with less melodrama. By his own wording, he's treating the fact that these nurses go out, drink, and have sex in their free time with as much horror as if they had been drunkenly humping the patients themselves. The real complaints to be found here are

• that the nurses weren't maintaining an acceptable level of hygiene and therefore could be putting patient health at risk
  
• were discourteous towards their charges
  
• were scruffy and unprofessional, and
  
• that drinking heavily the night before going into work could impair their ability to deliver a high standard of care (whilst discussing this in front of a patient will do nothing for their trust in their carers).

THOSE are complaints. 'My nurses like alcohol and have libidos' is not.

Dear Lord Mancroft,

Grow up, lodge real complaints and stop slut-shaming.

Yours,
Mwezzi.

No "kisskisskiss for you". That might be too slutty for your tastes.



NOTE: Click the title of this post for the BBC article. Neat, huh? Please tell me if you prefer this format or not.

New Blog Links!

I've added a couple more feminist sites to the right there, and you'll also notice a new section - "Of Interest". This is for not-necessarily-feminist sites that are well worth a look at - and the first one, Ramblings of Today's Yoof, is written by a friend so I will be very sad if you don't visit it. It currently focusses on consumer advice for people interested in all things green and earth-friendly, as well as products that could be better for you. She's covered budget- and environmentally-friendly household cleaning products (and knows which ones do and don't work!) and even fairtrade contraceptives, so go have a look. She also writes about human rights, and this includes feminism - she's just put up a video of standard anti-feminist bullshit, which we've both flagged.

Politics

While it was no surprise to learn that Gordon Brown will be running the country for the next few years, our new Deputy Prime Minister was a little more unexpected. Harriet Harman won the race by an approximately 0.6% lead, finally pulling ahead of Alan Johnson in the final round of voting.

Ms. Harman has been described as 'Labour's in-house feminist', and in her acceptance speech said that she would work for equality of women as well as men, among many other things. However, some of her comments were a little confusing. She said that she realised the need for more women in power in order to have a truly representative and fair government, but then went on to say that, as women need more opportunities, she would be 'championing the family'. Now, does that mean she'll work for childcare, to allow more women to pursue a career? Is she somehow assuming, because or despite her own position as a professional working mother, that all women want families if they don't already have them? Why were 'women's rights' equated so flippantly with 'family rights'? They may be closely connected, but they are by no means one and the same. What, exactly, did she mean? Mwezzi doesn't know. Hopefully her intentions in this area will become clearer.
Despite these initial musings, I'm not going to dismiss her out of hand. After all, she has campaigned for more female MPs, paid parental leave and has been critical of the party's stance on women's rights - definitely a good thing to keep in mind when mulling her speech over. Her other policies, including improving youth work and apologising for the war, and her focus and willingness to go against the grain if she opposes something are all promising. The only thing left to do now? Wait and see how she performs in her new role. Good luck to her, I say.

Religion and Politics - Making A Bed To Tell Lies In.

Up here in Scotland we have just been receiving the latest news about our local elections, the missing votes, the recounts, the gains and losses. When my parents were readying themselves to vote on May 3rd, my mother an I sat in the living room looking through the various leaflets we'd received from all the hopeful candidates. There was the SNP, giving us a simplified version of their manifesto, and there was Labour, telling us not to vote for the SNP. The Conservatives echoed Labour's actions in the past few years in their own policies, then told us to make a difference by voting for them. Even the BNP tried their hand, with a big red-white-and-blue leaflet telling us that they were just like Labour but without the ethnic tolerance. But hang on, there are more parties than that. Where were the Greens? The SSP? Come, on, there are some gaps to fill in here.
A quick Google search yielded odd results. The Scottish Christian Party called the extra-liberal Greens 'eco-fascists' due to their plan to stop giving government funding to religious schools, and to merge them with non-denominational schools. The SCP says this will remove parental choice. Alright then, let's see what those lovely Christians have to say to convince us that a fully religious education (not just R.E.) is still a good thing. Off I trot to their website. Being an atheist, I have no intention of voting Christian when my chance comes. However, aside from that, the SCP gave me plenty to dislike.

I followed the sound of some cheesy music to a television spot that they had in Inverness, styled like a news broadcast. I was immediately faced with at least two reasons to oppose them:

According to research, teenagers who have an abortion are up to 800% more likely to develop breast cancer in later life, with abortions among under-16s reaching record levels. This spells a cancer crisis for Scotland in the coming decades...

Huh? What study was this? Last time I looked, the overwhelming evidence was that there is no link between having a safe, legal abortion and breast cancer. Look here (emphasis my own):

In February 2003, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) convened a workshop of over 100 of the world’s leading experts who study pregnancy and breast cancer risk. Workshop participants reviewed existing population-based, clinical, and animal studies on the relationship between pregnancy and breast cancer risk, including studies of induced and spontaneous abortions. They concluded that having an abortion or miscarriage does not increase a woman’s subsequent risk of developing breast cancer.

But wait, there's more! Cut to Dr. Murdo Murchison, former Director of Health for Grampian Health Board:

...There are other problems, much more immediate; there's the immediate psychological problem for the woman concerned, there's [sic] possible fertility problems, and these are all areas of considerable concern.

Where to begin?! Fertility problems are extremely rare - in fact, they're more a problem with unsafe abortions of the kind practised in back-alley terminations, and if abortion is legal and easy to obatain, if doctors are trained to perform them correctly... well. Suffering infertility from an abortion in such circumstances would be almost unheard of. Not to say that women shouldn't know the risks, but it's a risk that is far smaller than the report would have you believe here. There is a risk to every medical procedure out there, including getting tetanus jabs - and early abortions carry a smaller risk than later, surgical ones. The majority of abortions occur early on (I'll link when I find that). As for psychological problems, Feministing covered this one a while back. It links to a ten-page NY Times article that shows a lot of evidence that abortion itself doesn't have psychological implications, and is, in fact, no worse than carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term:

Academic experts continue to stress that the psychological risks posed by abortion are no greater than the risks of carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. A study of 13,000 women, conducted in Britain over 11 years, compared those who chose to end an unwanted pregnancy with those who chose to give birth, controlling for psychological history, age, marital status and education level. In 1995, the researchers reported their results: equivalent rates of psychological disorders among the two groups.

Studies have also found that harmful psychological effects can actually be created by so-called 'abortion counselling' that basically tells the woman that she has killed a human being and must live with and atone for that for the rest of her life. If I can find the relevant links for that, I'll update this post later. On a related note, if they want to cut abortion rates, they might want to consider educating adolescents about safer sex and the like - from the insider accounts I get, the sex-ed currently on offer in some of the Catholic schools is beyond the pail. However, I doubt that's on the SCP's 'to-do' list.
...It isn't! Here's what their manifesto says on the matter:

The Scottish Christian Party will call for sex education classes to be given only to children on a parental opt-in basis. The Scottish Christian Party will fight for the promotion in school of chastity before marriage, and faithfulness in marriage, as the safest sexual practice, as and when sex education is taught.

What? They abhor abortion, but also don't want mandatory sex education? Does anyone else see a problem here?

So far, so bad... but we ain't finished, oh no. You can't have a party preaching the gospel truth without a hearty dose of sexual intolerance, can we? When telling us to vote for the SCP, the party's leader, Englishman Rev. George Hargreaves invokes Godwin's Law:

In 1933 Adolf Hitler passed a law saying that Kosher food should be banned. Within 10 years he was murdering millions of Jews. Next week on the 30th April, regulations come in that affect Christians. The Sexual Orientation Regulations come into force. We must stop this. Go out and vote for the SCP on May 3rd, it is the only way we can stop the Sexual Orientation Regulations from becoming law, which is the first stage of persecution of Christians in this land.

What, exactly, are the SORs? Well, another site, Christian Concern for Our Nation bemoans them and gives us an outline:

What are the Sexual Orientation Regulations (SOR)?
Using power they gave to themselves through the Equality Act 2006, the government are pushing through a new law (the SOR) which will make it illegal for providers of goods, services, facilities, premises, education or public functions to discriminate against the recipients on the grounds of their sexual orientation i.e. whether they are homosexual, heterosexual or bisexual.

Oh dear, Christian, Muslim or indeed any religious schools will not be allowed to say that gay children will go straight to hell, and are abominations. B&B owners won't be allowed to turn away gay couples. What is the world coming to, when we can't tell people to be heterosexual or die? Check the manifesto again...

The Scottish Christian Party will also call for the re-instatement of Section 2A, thus calling for the end of the promotion and “the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship."

In essence, this party wants to turn the clock back on women's reproductive rights and to reserve their 'right' to treat 'undesirable' or 'unGodly' types such as homosexuals as second-class citizens. Then they have the audacity to say that others are persecuting them.

I sincerely hope these people didn't make any major gains this year.