Heather Michon's Open Salon Blog

Why I Support Keeping a Woman On British Banknotes

Tue, 7 May 2013 11:05:27 -0400

I’ve never visited England. As with so many things in life, this is not from lack of desire as much as lack of funds. Usually, my interest in British currency extends only to the current exchange rate, but last week I found myself signing a Change.org petition to the Bank of England to keep a female face on the banknotes.

The petition rose out of a decision by the Bank of England to replace the image of 19th Century reformer Elizabeth Fry - the only woman other than the Queen to appear on the nation’s currency - with Winston Churchill in a redesign of the £5 note.

This is hardly an issue in the United States. Since we started issuing a unified national currency in the early 20th Century, all the faces on American banknotes have been male: George Washington ($1), Abraham Lincoln ($5), Alexander Hamilton ($10), Andrew Jackson ($20), Ulysses S. Grant ($50) and Benjamin Franklin ($100).

And our coins? Male-dominated. Abraham Lincoln reappears on our pennies, Thomas Jefferson graces the nickel, Franklin Roosevelt the dime, George Washington the quarter, John F. Kennedy on the half-dollar.

But, to be fair, American coinage isn’t strictly a boy’s club.

The U.S. Mint introduced the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, honoring the great 19th Century suffragist, in the summer of 1979.

However, the dollar coin never really caught the public’s attention as common currency. For one thing, it didn’t replace the dollar banknote. People had an option. Worse, the “Susie” was almost indistinguishable in size from the quarter -- meaning millions of Americans lost collective millions over the years accidentally feeding the dollar coin into vending machines before production was finally halted in 1999.

In 2000, the Mint began issuing the Sacagawea dollar coin, featuring the legendary female Native American scout to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Despite millions devoted to advertising campaigns and partnerships with Walmart and other corporations, the Sacagawea dollar (also called the Native American dollar) has proved no more popular than the Susie. While it remains in circulation, it’s only produced in limited quantities. Most of us probably couldn’t recall the last time we accidentally fed one into a parking meter.

This is why I signed the U.K. petition: because I’m so used to male faces on my money, so used to the female-branded money being turned into a running joke, that it never occurred to me that women on our money could be a serious thing.

In part because it is so ubiquitous, currency is an important part of a nation’s culture and identity. The faces we see on that currency speaks to that culture and identity, and the lack of gender diversity on money speaks volumes as to where women place within their culture.

The faces on American currency were selected by the Treasury in 1929, with the idea they they should be people everyone should recognize and honor - the criteria almost every nation has used in currency design over the decades.

Now, women are an active, vital part of public life and our shared history. U.S. banknotes aren’t going to change anytime soon, but other nations shouldn’t be quick to remove women from theirs.

In the immortal words of Abigail Adams - one of those women who perhaps deserves to be recognized on our currency - central banks and treasuries around the world need to “remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.”

Sign the petition.

"We Came, We Stripped, We Conquered:" A Case For Femen

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:04:00 -0400

Femen Protestors (via GlobalPost.com)

This week marks the fourth anniversary of the founding of Femen, the Ukrainian feminist group that has grabbed global headlines for their topless protests, and they’ve been celebrating in their trademark style - flashing Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a visit to a technology exhibition in Germany; staging “International Topless Jihad Day” to protest the treatment of a Tunisian Femen supporter who posted topless protest photos of herself online earlier this year; protesting topless in St. Peter’s Square during the recent papal conclave.



What started in 2008 to draw attention to the thousands of Ukrainian women trafficked into the international sex trade each year soon morphed into what it is today: a full-throated, full-frontal assault on patriarchy, prostitution and religion. “We are feminism’s shock troops, spearhead unit of militants, the modern incarnation of the word fearless,” writes spokesperson Inna Shevchenko in The Guardian. They are not shy, and they are not afraid to take a literal beating for their cause.

And they are not universally beloved. “Put your shirts back on, ladies,” writes Naheed Mustafa in Foreign Policy. “Fast-food feminism,” sniffs Mona Chollet in Le Monde Diplomatique. Their recent focus on “freeing” Muslim women from what they see as the oppression of religious dress codes has drawn fire from all quarters. “Muslim women can proclaim freedom for themselves,” writes Mohadesa Najumi in The Feminist Wire. “Forcing one ideology over another isn’t freedom.”

Made up of young women filled the zeal of radical activism, Femen seems largely unperturbed by the criticism. To them, old-school feminism seems stodgy and out of touch with the younger generation; to old-school, shirt-wearing feminists, Femen comes off as arrogant and offensive.

Nudity is hardly a novel form of protest. Lady Godiva did it way back in the 11th Century. African women adopted it near the turn of the 20th Century and continue to use to this day. A colorful array of peaceniks, animal rights’ activists, nudists, public breastfeeding advocates and environmentalists have taken it all off in support of their political passions for the better part of five decades. Just this week, a group of women in India stalled a land-grab by steel multinational POSCO by threatening a nude protest.

“Nakedness is so provocative, even in the 21st century, when we think we’re so liberal and that we’ve seen it all,” Philip Carr-Gomm, author of A Brief History of Nakedness, recently told USA Today. “It’s still a big deal.”

Femen is well aware of how big a deal it is. “We are not trying to be beautiful or sexy,” Shevchenko told The Atlantic earlier this year. “ We use our nudity as a weapon, to irritate people. We’re taking off what’s on the outside to show we can’t stand it anymore on the inside.”

By the metrics, they’ve been damn successful. With a core leadership of 20 women and between 40 to 100 topless activists, Femen has amassed a global following of 150,000 supporters. Their website has received nearly 400,000 hits in the past month. They have over 100,000 Facebook fans and 14,000 Twitter followers on their main English feeds. An unscientific search on Google News finds over 1.4 million stories.. Most feminist groups don’t come close to that kind of publicity and social reach.

But to what end? critics say. Femen is more about provocation than policy. Action without change. With so many “real” issues for women to tackle, do we really need a bunch of skinny blonde girls distracting the masses with their boobs?

This argument presupposes that mere provocation is bad. It’s not.

Every time Femen gets itself in the news, we have to think about uncomfortable things - beginning with the implications of women turning their naked torsos into breathing billboards. We have to compare blonde Ukrainian tits to black African tits and talk about why one set gets more attention than the other. We have to think about the fine balance between religious adherence and personal freedom, about neo-colonialism and globalization. Every time they take a position, they open a space in the public mind for others to make the other arguments.

This isn’t a polite TED Talk about opting out and leaning in. It’s a loud, messy, multi-cultural, multi-generational debate over the soul of feminism. It may turn out that the debate has many answers, but what Femen gives us a whetstone upon which we can sharpen our positions. The strong our arguments, the stronger philosophies and policies we can create.

At the Femen headquarters in a Muslim neighborhood in Paris, there’s a banner on the wall: “We Came, We Stripped, We Conquered.” Time will tell on that last bit. But for now: keep taking off those tops, ladies. You’re doing fine.

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What If Chris Stevens Wanted His Journal Made Public?

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 10:09:33 -0400

Anderson Cooper devoted a large portion of Monday’s AC360 to defending the network against State Department broadsides for the use of portions of a document written by U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, discovered in the wreckage of the mostly unsecured diplomatic compound in Benghazi by correspondent Arwa Damon three days after an attack that took the life of Stevens and three others in what most government sources are now admitting was a planned terrorist attack.

Since CNN’s first use of the journal in a report on September 19, eight days after the murders, the State Department has called the network’s actions everything from “disgusting” to “indefensible” and argues that the news organization went directly against the wishes of the Stevens family in even the most vague reference to the contents of the journal.

CNN, for its part, maintains that they contacted both the State Department and the family within hours of finding the document, promptly returned the original to the family without any obligation to do so, and sat on the story until they could confirm what they found newsworthy within the document. They only admitted to the journal’s existence after a rival news organization sniffed it out.

Has CNN broken any established rules of journalistic ethics? Most journalists seem to say that there’s no easy way to answer that question.

In essence, though, they’ve used the document as if they had talked to Stevens on background, reporting the substance of his views without presenting direct quotes or or divulging his identity. They confirmed with at least three other surviving sources that that Stevens had voiced his concerned about deteriorating security conditions in Benghazi, the growing threat of Islamic extremism in fragile post-Qaddafi Libya, and his presence on an Al Qaeda “hit list.” All of that would seem to be within bounds, and it simply can’t be argued that it isn’t newsworthy.

The crux of the State Department’s argument is that Stevens’s journal was private, and therefore firmly out-of-bounds. In their view, his private papers reverted to his family upon his death, and “reneged” on promises to the family by using them at all.

There may be truth to that in some legal sense, but in the real world—where all sorts of classified and unclassified documents are left laying around, unguarded, for anyone to find— even putatively “private” writing is never truly private. If you record something, on paper or on pixels, you accept a risk that they may be seen. That’s true if you're a teenage girl scribbling in a Hello Kitty diary about that cute boy in your English class or a high-ranking diplomat worrying about terrorists knocking down your front door.

It’s unfortunate that CNN will not be able to release the original text in its entirety. The network has declined to characterize the journal beyond describing it as a seven-page document. It hasn’t said what time frame it covers, or if it seems to be part of a longer journal, or how much of the text is devoted to security fears. Without that context, it’s hard to know if Stevens perhaps meant for this document to become part of a public record.

There’s a big difference between a personal journal (“Dear Diary, got up at seven, ate some cereal, noticed some guys with RPGs clustered around the front gate....”) and an attempt to memorialize specific events (“Dear Diary, I’m writing this in case something happens to me....”).

We don’t know what category Stevens’s journal falls into, but we do know that multiple news organizations are finding evidence that the U.S. was aware of the growing threat in Benghazi and seemingly failed to beef up security around the diplomatic compound in response to that threat.

If his journal is in part a chronicle of that failure, it should be part of the public record and the Obama Administration should to answer to it.

The State Department has been canny in its use of the Stevens family as an emotional battering ram: nobody wants to be made to feel that they’re causing a grieving family more pain.

But the fact remains that Chris Stevens was a public servant killed while performing his duties as a representative of this country. His death was not a private one. It was the result of a terrorist attack and it has implications for American diplomatic relations, national security, even the presidential race. CNN is right to report from all the information they have collected, and time will almost certainly bear them out.

Is Monica Lewinsky Really Looking At A $12 Million Book Deal

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 11:09:07 -0400

Rumors have been swirling that ex-presidential ex-mistress Monica Lewinsky was not only shopping a “shocking” new tell-all book about her ill-fated Oval Office tryst with Bill Clinton, but that she had actually gotten a $12 million advance for the work from an unnamed publisher.

It’s hard to tell where the story originated, but it seems to be the bastard child of the New York Post and The National Enquirer. Over the last couple of days, it’s jumped the fence from Perez Hilton and The Hollywood Gossip to the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

The Huffington Post poured cold water on the story last night, quoting sources “close to Lewinsky” that say she is neither shopping nor planning a book—directly contradicting the National Enquirer’s sources “close to Lewinsky” that she was.

Of the two, HuffPo’s anonymous sources seem more believable, because the advance figure itself is flatly unbelievable. $12 million? For a 15 year old sex scandal most people stopped paying attention to 14 years ago?

If this were 2007 or 2008 and Hillary Clinton was running for the White House, maybe. Maybe.

Although still unlikely. Very few people get those kinds of multi-million dollar advances these days. In fact, Bill Clinton is the current record-holder for the biggest advance paid for a work of nonfiction, with a payout of $15 million for My Life, breaking Hillary Clinton’s record $8 million for Living History. Not only did both books make back their advances, when they released their tax returns in 2007, they showed that Bill Clinton had made $30 million from his memoir, and Hillary made over $10 million on hers.

Lewinsky, on the other hand, is not a proven seller. While there were rumors back in 1999 that Lewinsky had been offered advances in the $6 million range, she ended up collaborating with Andrew Morton on Monica’s Story for somewhere around $1.5 million. Morton was flush off the success of Diana: Her True Story and the impeachment trial was fresh in the public mind. The book spent a couple weeks on the bestseller list and headed for the remainder bin.

So, short of telling the world that that Bill Clinton is, in fact, an alien from the planet Zargon 6, it’s hard to imagine what “shocking new revelations” are going to move the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of books needed to justify that kind of outlay

And one more thing: As much as we like to cast mistresses as eternally “low” women, a tawdry tell-all simply doesn’t fit Lewinsky’s behavior over the last fifteen years.

She surfaces in the news like this every once in awhile, but she mostly stays below the radar. She spent a few years in England to get her masters, she makes handbags, she goes to some A-list parties in New York, she does the occasional interview. That’s about it.

To her credit, Lewinsky has never indicated the desire to hurt the Clintons any more than she already has. She’s never acted like it was fun to be an almost-40 year old woman perpetually judged for her behavior as a starstruck 22-year old. In an era when she still could parlay her notoriety into anything from Playboy spreads to reality-show stardom, she’s behaved pretty much like the nice, upper middle-class girl she was raised to be.

Just because the Enquirer was right about John Edwards does not make them the go-to source on political sex scandals. It’s possible Lewinsky is going for a publishing deal, but until an actual publisher comes out with an actual announcement, it’s nothing but tabloid fantasy. The willingness of the mainstream media to repeat the story without better sourcing shows that, when it comes to Monica and Bill, we haven’t evolved much beyond the days of the Starr Report and that old blue dress.

Breasts & Power: The Case of Adrienne Pine

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 11:09:59 -0400

Professor Adrienne Pine & Lee

(Photo: Good Morning America)

There’s one inescapable conclusion to draw from the story of the professor currently making national headlines for breastfeeding during class: life would be a lot easier if women lactated through the elbow. Nobody gets worked up over an elbow.

The case of Adrienne Pine, assistant professor of anthropology at American University in Washington DC, is about our culturally muddled view of the female breast and its dual role as fetish object and feeding station; about the problems that working parents in general, and single parents in particular, face in balancing professional obligations with family responsibilities; about the ability of of social media and instant publishing to turn a non-story into a major incident. It's also a story about power: who seems to have it, and who really has it.

Dr Pine, confronted with a feverish child and no backup babysitter on the first day of the fall semester, made a choice. She took the baby to class. It wasn’t ideal, but it also wasn’t that big a deal. Nobody was hurt. Nobody saw a nipple. Nobody was even significantly inconvenienced. Aside from Pine, nobody seems to have caught the baby’s cold. While Pine says she sped through the syllabus review and lecture, it also doesn’t sound like she skipped anything.

However, someone tweeted while class was still in session (“Sex, gender, and culture professor, total feminist, walks in with her baby, midway through class breast feeding time #wtf”), and Pine was soon confronted with a student reporter who wanted to talk to her about what the reporter referred to as “the incident.” After the reporter cornered her for an interview the next day, Pine went into a defensive crouch. She asked the student newspaper not to run with the story, and then she preemptively published her account of events -- written in High Academic-speak and dripping with disdain for the reporter and the paper -- in CounterPunch online.

Plenty of commentators have held forth on how Pine is guilty of multiple counts of “unprofressionalism.” It was bad enough that she brought a sick baby into a classroom and nursed it...but to compound it by refusing to admit she did anything wrong and insulting a plucky young journalist trying to get to the truth.? Beyond the pale.

But look at it from Pine’s perspective. As soon as the reporter emailed her, she saw the trap. What seemed like a minor event to her suddenly had the potential to blow up in her face and become a career-killer.

The tone of her CounterPunch essay is not defiance. It’s near-panic.

As a feminist, Pine says she has struggled to maintain a wall between her role as mother and anthropologist. As as a working woman, she based her decision on how calling in sick on an important day would look to her employers. One arguably bad decision, and that wall seemed to be crumbling.

“[The] paper is threatening to create a hostile work environment for me, when I am already stretched to the limit of my own health and well-being as a full-time professor and single parent,” she wrote in an email to a fellow faculty member.

“I am wary of story about a manufactured controversy that serves no other purpose than to be tabloid titillating, permanently overshadowing my reputation (good or bad) based on my actual academic and other work.”

However rarified it might seem, the academic job market is no different from any other. Academe has it’s own 1% and it’s own 99%, and there’s tremendous competition for fewer and fewer decent jobs. Employers and potential employers are looking for any metric to narrow the field of applicants. So, if you Google a professor's name and the first thing that comes up is her tit, what do you suspect might happen to that applicant’s chances?

In this day and age, it does not matter that Adrienne Pine has a PhD from Berkeley, or that she’s an expert on Honduras, or that she’s widely published, or that she’s gotten generally high marks from students before that day. Students today are increasingly cast as consumers in the educational marketplace. They’re paying big bucks for service, and that often doesn’t allow much leeway for missteps.

Within that framework, Pine is more like a waitress who screwed up a drink order, except in this case, instead of stiffing her on a tip, she stands to lose reputation and income at the critical mid-point of her career.

Is this to say that a professor should be treated with more respect than a waitress?

No. It’s to say that in this in Era of Anxiety, we need to try to be tolerant of the mistakes and missteps anyone is going to make, no matter what job they do. None of us are perfect, and none of us deserve to be judged -- much less punished -- by one bad day or one bad choice.

The campus newspaper published its first story on the incident this week, and noted that Dr. Pine had written an apology to the staff and reporter. While the story is only now reaching critical mass in the national media, as a camups issue, AU seems to be moving on, and Pine and her students should now be able to get back to the business of learning about "Sex, Gender & Culture." It seems they will have plenty to talk about.