Squandered Opportunities

He is back. I suppose he never really went away, I have just been doing my best to ignore him.

The self-appointed defender of "men's rights" against the tryanny of "feminazis", is now suing Columbia University for offering Women's Studies courses.

Sure, why not. He's sued everybody else from his ex-wife, to his neighbors, to night club owners.

What truly irks me about this guy is that, I essentially think he is (legally and ethically) right when it comes to his suit over the allegedly discriminatory practice of 'Ladies Night' -- that decades-old and for some reason still-holding-on practice of letting women into clubs for free or a reduced cover charge. He and I certainly diverge on why this practice is wrong (he doesn't like that it costs men more, I don't like that it treats women as a commodity to attract "paying customers" akin to a good sound system or drink specials), but, damn, he filed the suit that feminists should have filed years ago. It should have followed on the heels of feminist-sponsored suits and legislation to remove gender segregation from bars and restaurants in the 1970s, but it didn't.

When I interviewed Karen DeCrow a few years ago (former NOW president and leading feminist lawyer pushing for gender equality in public space... including both ending restrictions against unescorted women in bars and adding baby changing stations to men's restrooms in public buildings), I asked her about Ladies Night. She agreed it was discriminatory toward men and only furthered second-class status for women. She said she would absolutely file suit on it, if a male plaintiff approached her. I remember her having hopes for a nice young college man from nearby Syracuse University... she had talked to a few about it even... but the men feared that they would look ridiculous for making a fuss. So nothing happened... except that opponents of feminism, namely a person who seems to have no grasp about the ways in which feminism is about non-discrimination and equality for many (not just women) and not about empowering women through disempowering men, have taken control of the issue for their own anti-feminist crusade.

Funny Feminists and Infuriating Footnotes

While searching in vain for the missing citation I need for a quote* in my very-nearly-finished article on girl watching, I came across Gloria Steinem’s classic “If Men Could Menstruate.” I’ve read it many, many times before, but it gave me a chuckle this morning. So I wanted to share.







*Yes, yes, I know this is silly. I am generally quite anal about such things – I keep all my papers and notes filed by where they came from so that I won’t have unattributed sources, I lecture my students about the need to be absolutely fanatical about keeping track of where their material comes from, I even tell them the story of the quotation I finally had to take out of my book in the very last draft because I could not find from where I had pulled it. And if you can’t cite it, you can’t use it.

To that end, anyone know a reference to secondary issues – or really the snowballing of issues – at the height of second wave radical feminism being referred to as “yeah, that too” issues? I thought it was in Ruth Rosen’s The World Split Open or Susan Brownmiller’s In Our Time, but I’m coming up with nothing so far…

This is What a Feminist Looks Like

Super-slick feminism for all. We're many colors and ages. Many of us are famous. We're bold, funny, and pretty. We like sex. We like boys. Don't be afraid. Oh my, did I mention it's slick?

Here is the Feminist Majority Foundations' new video.



Watcha think? Don't you want to be a feminist too?

Bathroom 'Integration'

Supervisor Feinstein Integrates Men's Restroom in San Francisco

The men's restroom in San Francisco's City Hal for male members of the S.F. County Board of Supervisors was liberated last month by Supervisor Dianne Feistein. After receiving no response to past complaints that she and Supervisor Dorothy Beoldingen were forced to use a ladies' restroom about 100 feet from the Board of Supervisors' chambers, Supervisor Feinstein entered an unmarked restroom a few feet from the chambers which has been reserved for men. "Its a liberated restroom now," she said. "We have equal rights there."1



I found this little tidbit on Feinstein in a giant stack of notes that I haven't been through in a couple of years. In light of the recent bathroom liberation movement by non-gender conforming activists, I am wondering if Feinstein's efforts led to a "unisex" bathroom or if her intent/the outcome was to produce a new "women's" bathroom.


There are many other cases of women since the 1970s demanding "women-only" restrooms in businesses and public buildings as they moved in greater numbers into jobs that had previously had few women.



But the legacy of sex discrimination is still fairly easy to see. At the Library of Congress, men's restrooms are located around the corner from the main reading room while women's rooms are only located on the floors above and below it. Pictured in this post is the looooong hallway between the stairs from the reading room and the women's restroom. When I interviewed at a certain second-tier state school in the south in the mid-1990s, men's bathrooms existed on each of the four floors of the building wing housing the History department, but there was only one women's room and it was a couple of floors up from the department. The female faculty were lobbying for "women's" restrooms on every floor...







That seems to have been the trend. Second wave feminists realized that the physical structure of offices and public places restricted women's presence in those places and consequently advocated for changes, such as the addition of restrooms. Almost all of the evidence that I have found so far indicates that the new additions were gender-specific spaces -- counter to the gender neutral policies these feminists otherwise advocated and exactly what is being challenged now.2





1 Capital Alert, vol 2 13(8 Sept 1972), 4; in Herstory I Update, Reel 2 [3]).
2 The one exception to this is a brief attempt on the part of Ti-Grace Atkinson at a NOW national board meeting in New York in May 1968 to de-gender bathrooms in the Biltmore Hotel. At least according to the minutes of that meeting, she never got any backing for this idea from other board members. National Organization for Women Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

News Roundup

As I've wandered about on the internet lately doing research and lounging about, I've come across a couple of interesting articles I thought I would share.First up, and very much related to my research, is this article on Mexico City introducing sex-segregated buses in order to protect women from harassment. The piece does a nice, quick job of summing up many of the tricky issues involved in addressing public harassment. Segregation provides small, temporary "safe" spaces for women, on the one hand. On the other, however, it smacks of "protectionism," which only reinforces women's inferior status (i.e. they can't take care of themselves, so the bus company or city government must take care of them) and limits their options (what does it mean if you are a woman and don't take the "women's" bus?). I am both amused and saddened to see that this article from 2008 is still stuck on the same issues that trouble feminists in the early 1970s.

Next up, and hopefully more related to my life than my research, is the release of a research study completed last year at Rutgers that found that folks who identify as feminists have healthier intimate relationships. There are some blogs about this study and this article in the The Guardian that, to my mind, wanders off topic a bit, but has the basics of the study. As the blog and comments note, the mainstream press didn't report much on this study.