Heather Michon's Open Salon Blog

"Evil Is Coming In Through The Woman"

Thu, 10 May 2012 09:05:31 -0400

One of the tricky parts about Blogging While Feminist is deciding which issues are worth tackling. Some days, it's far too tempting to be sidetracked by outrage...or the outrageous.

Other times, it's not so hard at all.

Submitted for your examination: Jesse Lee Peterson.

He’s a minister of some sort, although it’s very hard to call him “Reverend.” An ultra-conservative favorite of Sean Hannity who describes himself on his website as "this generation's Booker T. Washington," Peterson hosts a syndicated radio show and runs the nonprofit Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND), an organization which wants to rebuild the family "by rebuilding the man." Key to his philosophy of man-boosting seems to the idea that behind every great man is a submissive woman.

One of Peterson’s “sermons” was uploaded to YouTube by BOND back in March, but only started getting serious attention over the several days. In his talk, he calmly defines all of womanhood as a undifferentiated mass of stupid, helpless, crazy whores who are going to lead to the destruction of all mankind.

"I think one of the greatest mistakes America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote," he says. "We should have never turned that over to women. It was a big mistake." Why? Because they actually vote. "And these women are voting for the wrong people. They are voting in evil people, who agree with them, who are taking us down this path of destruction."

"This is probably the reason that they did not allow women to vote, when men were men. Because men in the good old days understood the nature of the woman. They were not afraid to deal with it, and they understood that you let them take over, this is what would happen."

Now, with men being totally pussy-whipped and all, our destruction is nigh. "It's so unfortunate, but this is how evil is coming in. It's coming through the women...and I know you don't want to hear that."

But, he insists, it's Truth.

^{Jesse Lee Peterson & Kirsten Powers (Still image via BusinessInsider.com)}

Last week, Peterson was rather awesomely blindsided by FOX News political analyst Kirsten Powers during a panel discussion on Hannity's show.

After a very long question by Hannity on President Obama, Powers announced she hadn't realized she was going to be on with Peterson, so she was "hijacking" the panel. As Peterson broke into a visible sweat and did his damndest to talk over her, she took him to task for “using God’s word to teach misogyny.”

Hannity quickly came to his friend's rescue and steered the discussion back into safer waters, but it was the equivalent of seeing an albino elephant in the wild: a rare instance of a FOX News guest actually being called to account for their crap.

There isn’t much anyone can do to salvage a soul like Peterson. His damage, the roots of that fear and anger towards women, run deep. Having decided his words are Truth, attempts to challenge him only strengthen his resolve. He, and men like him, have their narratives.

We have ours.

Women were not “allowed” the opportunity to vote. We demanded the right to vote. We fought for the right to vote. It took seven decades, but we earned the right to vote. We’ve also earned the right to work in the professions of our choosing, defend our country in wars, and have sex for pleasure rather than procreation. We can also stay home, eschew birth control, and be submissive. It’s called “choice,” and it’s a pretty cool thing, especially since we didn’t have it for the better part of human history.

Even when it feels like overreacting, even when we’re accused of being “shrill,” every time someone like Mr. Peterson spouts off, we need to challenge him. Challenge that narrative. Every. Single. Time.

We can also make sure the wider public knows about his views, so if there are parents out there who want to send their boys to BOND’s “character-building” programs – because how many mothers out there genuinely want their sons to go through life thinking that their masculinity rests on the subjugation of women?

If sunlight is the best disinfectant, we need to blast him and others like him with sunshine, because there are some pretty moldy ideas bubbling around in the shadows.

It’s a good use of outrage.

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Elizabeth Warren As Cherokee-American

Fri, 4 May 2012 10:05:26 -0400

If you need proof to confirm campaign silly season is already in full flower, look no further than the Massachusetts Senate race.

Incumbent Scott Brown has jumped with glee on a Boston Herald report last week that his Democratic opponent, Elizabeth Warren, had listed herself as “Native American” in a legal directory for a period of years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Harvard Law School administrators apparently used this designation to boost the institution’s diversity profile after Warren joined the faculty in 1992.

Warren, born and raised in Oklahoma, says that she had been told of her Cherokee roots through family tradition and told reporters that she added the listing to a professional directory “in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that every happened, that was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off.”

While Warren was unable to provide proof for her claims of Cherokee ancestry, genealogist Christopher Child of the New England Historic and Geological Society quickly located a copy of a 1894 document that indicated her great-great-great-grandmother was, in fact, identified as a Cherokee. And despite the Brown campaign’s claims, no evidence has emerged that Warren ever tried to use Native American “minority” status as a way to advance her academic career.

“Great-Grandma Was Cherokee”

While a lot of people reflexively find the idea of a blue-eyed Harvard professor claiming Native American roots absurd, any professional genealogist will tell you that Warren is hardly unique in claiming a partial Cherokee ancestry. Thousands of American families, particularly those whose roots stretch back to the Carolinas and the Western Plains, have a strong oral tradition of mixed heritage. The industry shorthand is: “Great-grandma was a Cherokee princess.”

In his Cherokee Proud: Tracing Honored Ancestors, Tony Mack McClure jokes that “it seems that virtually everyone who wears shoes has been told at one time or another that they are Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek or whatever. In the Cherokee culture, especially, this is so prevalent that we jokingly say Adam and Eve must have been Tsalagi!”

These claims are often hard to prove, but just as often rooted in reality. It’s impossible to encapsulate the complex history of the Cherokee in a few sentences, but the key point in the Warren story is this: of all the Native American tribes, the Cherokee were the most likely to intermarry with “white” Americans, beginning in the Carolinas in the late 1700s and increasing after their forced removal to what is now Oklahoma in the mid-1800s.

The total number of Cherokee intermarriages is unclear – perhaps a few thousand over the course of 150 years. While that does not seem like a lot, keep in mind that population growth is exponential.

Consider the most famous Native American intermarriage: Pocahontas and John Rolfe. Pocahontas had on child, Thomas. Thomas had one child, Jane. Jane had six children. Nearly 400 years later, an estimated two million Americans can claim direct descent from Pocahontas and Rolfe.

For the Cherokee, all this meant that by 1900 there were very few in the tribe that could claim an unalloyed bloodline. In a 1990 study, the Census Bureau found that only about 15,000 of some 300,000 registered Cherokee identified as “full blood.” The degree of blood quantum – the minimum requirement for legal admission to a tribe – varies within the different tribal units of the Cherokee nation, but is relatively low compared to the majority of recognized tribes. The current Principle Chief of the Cherokee Nation, Bill John Baker, is 1/32 Cherokee by blood.

The same as Elizabeth Warren.

Embracing a Heritage

What does this all mean?

Politically, it would seem, very little. Unless Brown’s campaign can come up with some proof Warren lied or inappropriately used her heritage, the story should lose quickly lose steam.

But reaction to the story has been telling. Two weeks ago, Warren thought of her Cherokee lineage as just an interesting, half-heard tidbit from her family history. Now, conservative “comedian” Dennis Miller is calling her “Spreading Bull” and some Native Americans are deriding her as a “box-checker.”

Neither designation is fair.

American cultural history is far more complex than we generally realize, and how we define ourselves as individuals within that history is tricky. Most of us have some feeling about our family backgrounds, about where our ancestors came from. If we look in the mirror and see ourselves a little differently because we find our forbearers were Jewish or African or Cherokee, is that necessarily a bad thing? Or does it strengthen our ties to the wider world and our collective human story?

Elizabeth Warren said she had included that listing in those long-ago directories in the hope of finding people who shared the same background. Now she has. Once the hubbub subsides, perhaps she will have the time and space to embrace it as what it is: a fascinating, complicated part of our shared cultural fabric.

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Can 'Slut' Be Reformed?

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:04:09 -0400

"We might as well own it, right?"

This is the new battle cry of Sluts Across America, a crowdsourcing website that wants to take the steaming cowpies dropped by Rush Limbaugh and his fellow travelers and form a "collective voice of the women and men in this country who use or support birth control, and are sick of being judged because of our desire to be responsible and safe about our sexual health."

"If protecting ourselves makes us sluts, then it's time to redefine what "slut" actually means."

Judging by the number of responses on the site, they have found large and willing audience. It's also on the verge of becoming a part of the wider efforts of groups like SlutWalk, which has made the reappropriating of "slut" a cornerstone of their movement.

Slut: A Linguistic History

Slut is an old gal, dating back well over a half a millennium old, and her meaning has changed in shape and form over the centuries.

Most scholars cite Thomas Hoccleve's poem "The Letter of Cupid" in 1402 as the first use of slut in English, but it got its start much earlier. Linguists find its roots all around the North Sea during the Middle Ages: among them the Icelandic slottr, the Swedish slata, the Dutch slodde and the Irish slaodaire.

Slut and its Germanic cousins originally meant things like lazy, dirty, idle, sloppy. It was not sexual, nor exclusively applied to females. ("Why is thy lord so sluttish, I thee pray," asks one of Geoffrey Chaucer's characters in The Canterbury Tales, wanting to know why one of the wealthy pilgrims was so slovenly dressed.) But around the time it arrived in English, it attached itself almost exclusively to women, usually kitchen or scullery maids.

The first known use of slut as a pejorative for a sexually promiscuous woman appeared around 1450. No mystery as to why; by the end of the Middle Ages, the basic Western views of women's sexuality had hardened into a form we might find all-too-familiar today. The veneration of the Virgin Mary and vilification of the sinful Eve defined the boxes into which all women were sorted.

So it's little wonder that slut was applied to women seen as morally, rather than just physically, dirty. This dual meaning walked hand-in-hand, right into the 20th Century, where its physical meaning fell away and its moral meaning flourished along with the sexual revolutions of the new century.

Reclaiming Slut

So slut has expanded a bit over time - but does that mean it can be turned into a positive?

Reappropriating derogatory words is not a new concept. From the Roundheads and sans-coulottes of the 17th and 18th Centuries to the queers and dykes of the late 20th Century to the Guidos of the Jersey Shore, there's almost no political, religious, ethnic or social group that hasn't attempted to take the sting out of hate language by turning it into a badge of honor.

Feminists have been intermittently trying to reclaim slut since at least the 1980s.

Oxford feminist linguist Deborah Cameron wrote about it in her 1992 book "Feminism and Linguistic Theory." While she was supportive of the goal of reappropriating language, she clearly saw the net result as futile. "We cannot simply change a word's meaning for the whole community by fiat," she argued. That's not how language works. The meaning is held in the intent of the speaker.

If you hurl the word slut as an epithet, it's a epithet. If you use it as a term of honor or endearment, it's a term of honor or endearment. But at the end of the day, it still means what it means to the person that's using it.

Slut is a particular challenge, both because of its longevity and its ubiquity. (A quick Google search alone finds 480 million hits for the word.) Strip away all the history and you're still left with a word which literally means "dirty." It's unlikely that any amount of protest signs or t-slogans or marches or websites can make it "clean."

This is not to say that the efforts to reclaim it are meaningless. Far from it: slut has spent the last six centuries being used as a rhetorical club against women, and finally women are able to use it to club right back. That is progress. Maybe we can't reform slut, but if we make it a useful tool in our feminist arsenal, maybe we can make all the pain and humiliation the word had wrought somehow more worthwhile.

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Audience for a Mass Murderer

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:04:08 -0400

The trial of confessed mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik had barely gotten underway in Oslo when debate erupted over the media's coverage of the event.

Press turnout was impressive. Some 800 reporters were on hand for the opening day; pool video coverage of most of the session were broadcast live on Norway's national television station, NRK; at least a half-dozen reporters live-tweeted the throughout the session, including those parts of the proceedings that NRK was not allowed to show live.

Online coverage in the Norwegian media sites has become so ubiquitous that at least two publications are looking at creating a button that would allow readers a "Breivik-free" version of their pages.

The criticism, voiced by both media critics and some of the survivors of his rampage, is that all the coverage is playing into Breivik's desire for a platform for his crackpot ideas of the dangers of Muslims, multiculturalism and women's liberation.

"He stated he did this to gain attention and I don't believe that he should gain attention to it," survivor Tore Sinding Bekkedal told the Associated Press. "I don't want to give him that reward."

Breivik, who began the trial by denying the authority of the Norwegian judiciary and called his murder of 77 people an act of "necessity," no doubt does perceive the public airing of his views as a reward for his actions.

In this case, that's actually a good thing. His trial is not about guilt or innocence. It's about deciding how his obvious mental disorder might define his punishment. The only "audience" that matters is the panel of judges. The more empowered he feels -- the more he plays to the audience, the more he plays to the gallery, the more disjointed his ramblings -- the better.

In an indication of just how ineffectual his arguments have been, one of the three lay judges hearing the case was dismissed this morning after news broke that he had written on Facebook last summer that Breivik should get the death penalty. Norway does not have the death penalty.

Fears that the public dissemination of Brevik's ideology could increase anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe also seem unfounded. The people who are likely to agree with him are those that already agree with him. The ideas he's espousing are the same ones he's been sharing on ultra-right forums for years now. He's unlikely to win fresh converts to his cause.

Plus, the saturation coverage is assuring that his claims are being debunked in real time. "Breivik claimed this morning that Norwegians would be a minority in their own capital 'within five years,'" The Guardian reported on their live-blog of Tuesday's proceedings. "That is not what the statisticians say. Statistics Norway predicts that immigrants are set to make up almost half of Oslo's population by 2040 and its definition of "immigrants" includes children of immigrants..."

How the media should cover sensational legal cases is always a debate worth having. We've all seen situations where the depth of coverage has gone far, far overboard.

In this situation, Breivik's crime was an assault not only against a group of innocent victims but against Norwegian society as a whole. That society deserves every opportunity to see him confined within the strict rules of the judicial process, challenged on every statement, held to task for every action, and finally, sent away to jail or an institution for however long the judges see fit. It's not a reward for him. It's the best way to exorcise him from the public mind.

^{Photo by Stoyan Nenov/Reuters}

No Table For Helen Thomas?

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:03:57 -0400

In late February, Helen Thomas wrote a letter to the board of the White House Correspondents Association.

"As the first woman president to preside over the WHCA, and one of a few women who were instrumental in successfully convincing President Kennedy to boycott the dinner, it is very important to me to celebrate the 50th anniversary of this monumental feat with my family and close friends this year."

"I was told that past presidents are entitled to 2 tickets, and that because I retired from working at the White House when I was 90 years old, I am no longer eligible to purchase the table I have had for years. Even though I have retired, I continued to write a weekly column for the Falls Church New Press," she continued.

"I would appreciate -- particularly this year as we celebrate the 50 year anniversary of women being admitted to the WHCA dinner -- to share this celebration with my family and close friends one last time."

The argument apparently found little support in the ranks of the WHCA. Current president Caren Bohan of Reuters tells the Huffington Post that "the board decided in 2010 to set a policy that, as a courtesy to past presidents only, they would be eligible to purchase two tickets even if they are no longer covering the White House. Usually, people need to be members of the WHCA to purchase tickets on behalf of their news organizations."

The WHCA has every right to set the rules for their events, and since the annual April gala has become one of the hottest tickets in town, those rules have had to get tighter and tighter to accommodate bigger and bigger names.

Yet, in a year when the still unsettled status of women in society has been so present in the public mind, it seems tone-deaf not to yield to Thomas’s request to celebrate a milestone in WHCA history.

When Thomas joined the White House beat in 1960, she and her fellow female reporters were welcome to pay their annual $2 dues to the WHCA, but they were barred from attending the annual dinner.

As with all-male bastions like the National Press Club, the dinner was one of those places where Washington newsmakers and journalists drank and smoked and gossiped and passed along those tips that made for above-the-fold stories in tomorrow’s early edition.

Thomas and her some of her female colleagues wanted in to that elite group, and in the spring of 1962 went directly to President Kennedy to argued that “he should not attend the dinner if we couldn’t.” Kennedy agreed, and for the first time in 42 years, women were allowed to join.

Contrary to the fears of her male counterparts, the world did not come to an end, and a dozen years later Thomas became the first female president of the organization. She’s one of only nine women to hold the post in the group’s 98-year history.

Since the purpose of the dinner is to "acknowledge award-winners, present scholarships, and give the press and the president an evening of friendly appreciation," it would seem that giving a little extra space for Thomas to celebrate her professional achievement would not be a hardship. After all, the ballroom at the Washington Hilton seats around 3,000 people.

But the logic seems to go something like this: sell some extra seats to Thomas, and where does Uggie, the dog from The Artist, sit?

Over the last decade, the “nerd prom” of yesteryear has turned into the Charles Atlas of Washington galas. Media outlets buy out whole tables and try to one-up another in packing those precious seats with superstar behinds.

And those toned backsides are increasingly happy to join. “It's a fashionable fly-in for Hollywood types who need a red carpet to be photographed on between Coachella and Cannes,” the Washington Post’s Reliable Source blog noted in 2010. Pre-parties and after-parties have almost outshadowed the main event, and there are probably as many celebrities in attendance as actual reporters.

This could be looked at as a sign that the media, politicians and celebrities have turned into a single megalopolis. The United States of Clooney. It could also be a sign that most DC journalists are, in fact, giant nerds who go bonkers over the idea of meeting Steve Buscemi. Either way, it has increasingly little to do with honoring one’s peers.

This year’s dinner is about a month away, and the WHCA could well change its mind. At the very least, one hopes they have the grace to acknowledge those women who first fought for their place at those tables.