Alternative Greeting Cards for New Mothers

Check out all ten at ScaryMommy.com

Sexist Ads

From Made Man

And some more:

CNN: Tim Gunn on Star Trek Fashion and Gender

Vaguely Homoerotic Navy Recruitment Posters

An interesting blog post titled The Gayest Generation: Navy Recruiting Posters from World Wars I & II. Check it out HERE.

Orthodox Jewish "Facebook" Separates Sexes

CNN

September 12th, 2011
08:34 PM ET

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish 'Facebook' separates the sexes

By Jessica Ravitz, CNN

(CNN) - Showing that modernity might, just might, find its place even in a world predisposed to the most traditional of customs, in walks FaceGlat: an ultra-Orthodox Jewish answer, at least for some, to Facebook.

Among the most conservative of Orthodox Jews, often referred to as Haredi Jews, modesty reigns. Women wear long sleeves and skirts, and they cover their hair after marriage. Men dress as their ancestors did centuries ago. The genders are separated in synagogues, on wedding dance floors and, in certain neighborhoods, on buses.

CNN reported this year on one community newspaper that went so far as to erase women from an iconic news photograph, all in an effort to uphold its values. The paper later apologized, not for its beliefs about modesty and featuring women in photographs but for how the matter was handled.

So social media – which, in the case of Facebook, invite sharing, tagging and gawking at photographs, among other interactions – may not be the most welcoming space for people with this kind of faith.

A 20-something self-taught website builder out of Israel, Yaakov Swisa, seems to be trying to change this.

Ynetnews, an English-language Israeli news site, reported in late July the establishment of FaceGlat, a Swisa-made social network that segregates men and women, blocks immodest advertisements and pictures, and uses a filter to keep language in comments and status updates clean.

“People who are God-fearing and care about their children’s education cannot tolerate the ads and pictures one sees on the regular Facebook,” Ynetnews wrote, quoting Swisa. “I personally know people who have deteriorated spiritually because of all kinds of things they were introduced to there.”

The name FaceGlat is a blending of Facebook with the word glatt, as in “glatt kosher,” the highest level of kosher when it comes to Jewish dietary laws surrounding meat. FaceGlat, Ynetnews reported Swisa as saying, is “not an alternative for Facebook” but rather “a cleaner option for those who are already there. If it encourages people to open accounts or waste their time instead of studying Torah – it’s a failure. It’s not worth a thing. I promised myself that if that happened I would close it down.”

According to a Le Monde report, posted late last week on Worldcrunch, a still-open FaceGlat has more than 2,000 users and is getting about 100 new accounts per week.

Read the full post HERE.

Researchers Dig Up 'Homosexual Or Transsexual' Caveman Near Prague

NPR

Researchers Dig Up 'Homosexual Or Transsexual' Caveman Near Prague

by Eyder Peralta

Researchers from the Czech Archaeological Society made an interesting discovery outside of Prague: The 5,000-year-old remains of a caveman were buried in an unusual manner. First, the male body was lying on its left side and its head was facing east. Second, the body was buried with domestic jugs and an egg-shaped pot.

Why is this odd? Time reports the way the body was buried might mean the man was gay, because the burial is consistent with the way women were buried. The bodies of men faced west and they were buried with hammers, flint knives and weapons.

Time adds:

"From history and ethnology, we know that people from this period took funeral rites very seriously so it is highly unlikely that this positioning was a mistake," [Kamila Remisova Vesinova, a researcher for the Czech Archaeological Society,] said at a press conference. "Far more likely is that he was a man with a different sexual orientation, homosexual or transsexual."

Vesinova told Ireland's Press TV that the man would have lived during the Stone Age's Corded Ware culture, which existed between 2,500 and 2,800 BC.

Katerina Semradova, another member of team, told The Daily Mail that colleagues had once found the body of a woman warrior buried as a man:

She added that Siberian shamans, or witch doctors, were also buried in this way but with richer funeral accessories appropriate to their elevated position in society.

"This later discovery was neither of those," she said. "We believe this is one of the earliest cases of what could be described as a transvestite or third-gender grave in the Czech Republic."

Now, let's sound a note of skepticism here: Dr. Lemont Dobson, a historian and archaeologist at Drury University, told us determining the sex of a skeleton by looking at the pelvis is 90 percent accurate but not perfect.

"There is always the possibility that the individual had some form of shamanistic role in their society," he says. "If so, the female position would be appropriate. I know the excavator suggests that this was not the case, but I am not convinced by the argument. I haven't seen enough compelling reason to discount such a role in this case."

Study on Female Adaptations to Prevent Rape

This is a fascinating write-up on a study about how the female body and female behavior has evolved to counteract the threat of rape:

SLATE
Science
Darwin's Rape Whistle
Have women evolved to protect themselves from sexual assault?
By Jesse Bering
Posted Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011, at 6:36 PM ET

Women, gather round, read carefully, because this gay man—who once, long ago, feigned sexual interest in your bodies—is about to shine a spotlight on some hidden truths about your natural design. It's by no means a perfect system, but evolution has endowed you with some extraordinary, almost preternatural abilities to prevent your own sexual assault. And these abilities are especially pronounced when you're ovulating.

Although it can certainly take other forms, rape will be defined throughout this article as the use of force, or threat of force, to achieve penile-vaginal penetration of a woman without her consent. Whether or not human males evolved to rape women is, to put it mildly, a controversial topic. The flames were fanned especially with the publication, about a decade ago, of Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer's A Natural History of Rape, which presented evidence of what appear to be biological adaptations in human males (as well as males of many other species) specialized for forcibly coercing females into copulation. They argued that rape is an adaptive behavior in certain contexts; for example, when consensual partners are unavailable. There is some evidence that convicted rapists are physically unattractive, at least as judged by women on the basis of their mug shots. And spousal rape is most likely to occur when the husband finds out (or suspects) his wife has been unfaithful, suggesting that he is attempting to supplant another man's seed. (In fact, the distinctive, mushroom-capped shape of the human penis is designed to perform the specialized function of removing competitors' sperm, which indicates an ancestral history of females having sex with multiple males within a 24-hr period.) Furthermore, UCLA psychologist Neil Malamuth and his colleagues found that one-third of men admit that they would engage in some type of sexual coercion if they could be assured they would suffer no negative consequences, and many report having related masturbatory fantasies.

Thornhill and Palmer, Malamuth, and the many other investigators studying rape through an evolutionary lens, take great pains to point out that "adaptive" does not mean "justifiable," but rather only mechanistically viable. Yet dilettante followers may still be inclined to detect a misogyny in these investigations that simply is not there. As University of Michigan psychologist William McKibbin and his colleagues write in a 2008 piece for the Review of General Psychology, "No sensible person would argue that a scientist researching the causes of cancer is thereby justifying or promoting cancer. Yet some people argue that investigating rape from an evolutionary perspective justifies or legitimizes rape."

The unfortunate demonization of this brand of inquiry is rooted in the fallacy of biological determinism (according to which men are programmed by their genes to rape and have no free will to do otherwise) and the naturalistic fallacy (that because rape is natural it must be acceptable). These are resoundingly false assumptions that reveal a profound ignorance of evolutionary biology. Yet the purpose of the remaining article is not to belabor that tired ideological dispute, but to look at things from the female genetic point of view. We've heard the argument that men may have evolved to sexually assault women. Have women evolved to protect themselves from men?

While it's debatable that a rape module lurks in the male brain, there is absolutely no question that rape is a distressingly common occurrence in our species. One study from 1992 found that about 13 percent of American women are raped; the real number is almost certainly higher since so many sexual assaults go unreported. And aside from its self-evident harms, there is no question that rape seriously impairs a woman's reproductive interests. To say that rape pregnancies are costly to a woman's genetic success would be an enormous understatement. Not only do such conceptions completely undermine the female's mate selection—and so the quality of her offsprings' genes—but rapists are unlikely to stick around and help raise children, putting such children at a significant disadvantage. In short, it's a catastrophic mess from the vantage point of the mother's genes.

Given the enormity of this adaptive problem for ancestral women, it is plausible that human females would have evolved a set of counter-adaptations to protect them from being raped, and that these anti-rape adaptations would be activated, specifically, during the woman's most fertile period, the periovulatory phase of her reproductive cycle. So with the foregoing theoretical sketch in mind, I now present to you an up-to-date list of four empirically validated "phase dependent female rape-avoidance mechanisms:"

1. When threatened by sexual assault, ovulating women display a measurable increase in physical strength. In 2002, SUNY-Albany psychologists Sandra Petralia and Gordon Gallup had 192 female undergraduate students read a story about either a female character being stalked by a suspicious male stranger in a parking lot (ending with: "As she inserts the key into her car door she feels his cold hand on her shoulder …") or a similar story in which the female character is surrounded by happy people on a warm summer's day (ending with: "She starts her car, adjusts the stereo, and as she pulls out of the parking lot those nearby can hear her music blasting"). The researchers measured the handgrip strength of each participant before and after she read the story, and compared the scores. Petralia and Gallup also knew from the results of a urine-based ovulation test kit where in their reproductive cycles each participant was, so the researchers could differentiate among women in the menstrual, follicular, ovulatory, and luteal phases. A fifth group consisted of those women who were on contraceptives at the time of the study. The results were unambiguous: Only the ovulating women who read the sexual assault scenario exhibited an increase in handgrip strength. Ovulating women who read the control passage and nonovulatory women who read the sexual assault material grasped with the same intensity as before.

2. Ovulating women overestimate strange males' probability of being rapists. Add this one to a growing list of adaptive cognitive biases—evolved psychological distortions that orient people toward strategic decision-making. These findings come from a 2007 report by Christine Garver-Apgar and her colleagues. "When the costs of being sexually victimized are highest," reason these investigators, "women should shift their perceptions to decrease false negative errors at the expense of making more false positive errors. Thus, we predicted that women perceive men as more sexually coercive at fertile points of their cycle than at non-fertile points." The researchers showed 169 normally ovulating women videotaped interviews with various men and asked them to rate the men on several dimensions, including their tendencies toward sexual aggression, kindness, or faithfulness. The more fertile the woman was at the time of her judging, the more likely she was to describe the men as "sexually coercive." Ovulating women didn't see these men as being less kind, faithful, or likely to commit—only more inclined to rape them.

3. ......

Read the entire article HERE.

Also, in a follow up, the author responds to his critics.

T-N Coates on the Racism in Kanye West's Latest Album

The Atlantic

On White She-Devils
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Jan 3 2011, 5:45 PM ET 121

I like the beats on Kanye West's new album. I love the inversion of that famous line about Malcolm X--"That's too much power for one man to have." I think he's an improved MC. But I'm a little amazed that no one's disturbed by "Champagne wishes/30 white bitches" as a hook. I'm more amazed at his empty employment of white women as objects. I'm less amazed, but pretty depressed, that colorism is back--"Rolling with some light-skin chicks and some Kelly Rowlands," is little more than "you're pretty for a dark-skin girl" in this postracial era.

All told, the album strikes me as incredibly, almost casually, racist. On some level, I wonder what would have become of John Mayer, had he cut a video with dead black women strewn about and invoked black women throughout his lyrics in the manner Kanye does. But moralism misses the point here. The problem isn't simply racism or sexism, but boring racism, boring sexism that hearkens back to the black power macho of Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver at their worst. It's the work of a failed provocateur boorishly brandishing his ancient affects. The obvious defense is that this is an exploration of West's psyche, of his fantasy. But actually it isn't. This is an aggressively external album obsessed with dismissing haters, slut-shaming women (black and white), and ultimately, not with Kanye or his fantasy, but with what you will surely say about his fantasy.

Read the full posts HERE, and as always, check out the comments at his blog.

New Orleans' Gender Bending Rap: NYT on "Sissy Bounce"

Long story in NYT Magazine.

July 19, 2010
New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap
By JONATHAN DEE

If “gay rapper” is an oxymoron where you come from, how to get your head around the notion of a gay rapper performing in a sports bar? What in most cities might seem plausible only as some sort of Sacha Baron Cohen-style provocation is just another weeknight in the cultural Galapagos that is New Orleans. Sometime after midnight on the sweltering Thursday before Memorial Day, the giant plasma-screen TVs at the Sports Vue bar (which “proudly airs all major Pay Per View events from the world of Boxing and Ultimate Fighting”) were all switched off, and the bar’s backroom turned into a low-lit, low-ceilinged dance club, where more than 300 people awaited a return engagement by Big Freedia, who by day runs an interior-decoration business and who is, to fans of the New Orleans variant of hip-hop music known as “bounce,” a superstar.

At 1 a.m., though, Freedia (pronounced “FREE-da”) was still a mile or so away, fulfilling a paid celebrity-hosting gig at Club Fabulous. The fabulousness of Club Fabulous, on this night at least, seemed a function mainly of its Mardi Gras-themed décor, conceived and executed by Freedia herself. Otherwise the crowd was sparse, largely straight and listless. Freedia looked weary as she leaned back against the bar with her dyed, diagonally cut bangs over one eye, holding a cordless microphone. (Freedia, who is about 6 foot 2 and very powerful-looking and dresses in a fashionable but recognizably masculine style, is genetically a man; but neither she nor anyone who knows her uses masculine pronouns to refer to her.) When “Rock Around the Clock,” one of her signature songs, came on the sound system, a few women walked over to Freedia and stood with their backs to her, but the atmosphere wasn’t quite electric enough for them to really start dancing, and the men just continued playing pool. After a while, Freedia’s D.J. and de facto manager, who goes by the name Rusty Lazer — a whippetlike 39-year-old white man with a salt-and-pepper beard — let Freedia know that it was time to move on to the next show.

The two of them had just returned from three nights at three different venues in New York, with a stop for another show in Philadelphia on their way home. These days Freedia performs five or six nights a week, often more than once a night — and increasingly, not just in New Orleans.

“Girl, I’m tired,” Lazer said as he drove them to the Sports Vue in his minivan, which was full of boxes of hand-screened Big Freedia T-shirts he sells at $10 a pop.

“Really?” Freedia said laconically. “I’m just starting to get my energy back.”

At the first sight of the commotion outside the Sports Vue, everyone’s energy level picked up. Lazer pulled the minivan into a long maze of cars parked haphazardly all up and down the grass median on Elysian Fields Avenue. Outside the metal detectors at the entrance, cops were pretending to listen to the grievances of two women who had just been thrown out of the bar. “Every night,” Lazer said fondly. While patrons were being patted down by bouncers inside the door, he and Freedia disappeared into the crowd; a few minutes later, the music stopped, and a loud, excited voice yelled into a mic a brief introduction — so brief the longest part of it was the polysyllabic participle between the words “Big” and “Freedia.”

And then something remarkable happened. The crowd — just about evenly divided between men and women — instantly segregated itself: the men were propelled as if by a centrifuge toward the room’s perimeters, and the dance floor, a platform raised just a step off the ground, was taken over entirely by women surrounding Freedia. The women did not dance with, or for, one another — they danced for Freedia, and they did so in the most sexualized way imaginable, usually with their backs to her, bent over sharply at the waist, and bouncing their hips up and down as fast as humanly possible, if not slightly faster. Others assumed more of a push-up position, with their hands on the floor, in a signature dance whose name is sometimes helpfully shortened to “p-popping.”

Freedia did “Rock Around the Clock,” which begins with a sample from the Bill Haley classic but departs pretty drastically from there, as well as her longtime club hit, “Azz Everywhere,” a title as perfectly high-concept in its way as “Snakes on a Plane.” Softspoken in person, Freedia has an onstage voice as deep and exhortatory as Chuck D’s. Her older songs sometimes had choruses that were actually sung (“I got that gin in my system/Somebody gonna be my victim”), but in her recent work, the beat is too fast to permit much more than short, repetitive chanting. Not that it mattered much in the context of the less-than-state-of-the-art sound system at the Sports Vue, where an occasional obscenity was pretty much as audible as any of the lyrics got.

A Big Freedia set generally lasts only four or five songs (which is why she can book two or three of them a night), but the energy brought to, and generated by, those songs is astounding. So, 20 cathartic minutes later, it was all over. Freedia left the stage, the men gravitated back toward the women and the sexual balance at the Sports Vue was restored. “Well,” Lazer said with a grin as he gave me a lift back to my hotel in his minivan, “I’ve lived in New Orleans a long time, and I know a lot of people, but you’ve just seen something that about 95 percent of my white friends will probably never see.”

Bounce itself has been around for about 20 years. Like most hip-hop varietals, it’s rap delivered over a sampled dance beat, but it has a few characteristics that give it a distinctively regional sound: it’s strictly party music, its beat is relentlessly fast and its rap quotient tends much less toward introspection or pure braggadocio than toward a call-and-response relationship with its audience, a dynamic borrowed in equal measure from Mardi Gras Indian chants and from the dawn of hip-hop itself. Many, if not most, bounce records announce their allegiance by sampling from one of just two sources: either Derek B.’s “Rock the Beat” or an infectious hook known as the “Triggaman,” from a 1986 Showboys record called “Drag Rap.” (That’s “drag” not as in cross-dressing but as in the theme to the old TV show “Dragnet.”) Just as the earliest New York rap records featured compulsory shout-outs to the boroughs, lots of bounce songs will demand (especially when performed live) audience acknowledgment of the city’s various neighborhoods and housing projects (“Shake it for the Fourth Ward/Work it for the Fifth Ward”), even those that have been razed. Otherwise the lyrics are mostly about sex and are so habitually obscene that they have helped keep bounce from spreading too far beyond its New Orleans borders. The success of bounce-tinged New Orleans artists like Lil Wayne and Juvenile notwithstanding, at least one New Orleans record-company executive speculates that major labels consider unadulterated bounce too hard to distribute, because it can’t be played on most radio stations or even sold in many venues.

The overwhelming majority of bounce artists are, of course, straight. But 12 years ago, a young drag queen who goes by the name Katey Red shocked the audience by taking the mic at an influential underground club near the Melpomene housing project where she grew up, and in that star-is-born moment, a subgenre of bounce took root. It is a sad understatement to say that homosexuality and hip-hop make for an unlikely fusion: hip-hop culture is one of the most unrepentantly homophobic cultures in America, surpassing even its own attitudes toward women in bigotry and smirking advocacy of violence. But New Orleans’s tolerance of unlikely fusions is legendary, and today Katey Red, along with a handful of other artists — Big Freedia (who grew up four blocks from Katey and started out as one of her background vocalists), Sissy Nobby, Chev off the Ave, Vockah Redu (who was captain of the dance team at Booker T. Washington High School) — are not just accepted mainstays of the bounce scene but its most prominent representatives outside New Orleans. Katey recently received a New Orleans consecration of sorts when she appeared as herself, unidentified, in an episode of the HBO series “Treme,” with her song “So Much Drama” playing in the background.

Some part of this subgenre’s popularity is surely due to the catchily discordant name by which it has become known: sissy bounce. The term is problematic, because the artists themselves do not care for it at all — not because they object to the word “sissy” but because they consider it disrespectful to bounce music. Even when their lyrics are at their frankest (“I’m a punk under pressure/When we finish, put my money on the dresser”), they rush to point out, correctly, that they’re just drawing from the life at hand in the same way virtually every rapper does. They have no desire to be typed within, or set apart from, bounce culture; and indeed, within New Orleans itself, they mostly are not — even as their bookings elsewhere in the country are founded increasingly on the novelty of their sexual identities.

The term “sissy bounce” is one for which a young New Orleans music writer named Alison Fensterstock takes very reluctant credit....

Check the original story for the rest, including images and video clips, which you can find HERE.

Slate on Women's Vigilante Gangs in India

SLATE
doublex
Wear a Pink Sari and Carry a Big Stick
The women's gangs of India.
By Amana Fontanella-Khan
Posted Monday, July 19, 2010, at 10:01 AM ET

In March, the Indian upper parliament passed a historic affirmative-action bill. If approved by the lower house, the law would reserve 33 percent of all parliamentary seats for women. You might think this would be well-received by rural women in India. But they long ago gave up on the government and have taken things into their own hands. India is witnessing a rise of vigilante groups, the most sensational of which is the gulabi, or pink gang, operating in the Bundelkhand district of the Uttar Pradesh state, one of the poorest districts of India. Some gangs have started what Indian journalists describe as a "mini-revolution" on behalf of women.

The founder of the gulabis is the fearless Sampat Pal Devi, 40, who was married off at the age of 12 to an ice-cream vendor and had the first of her five children at 15. The gulabis, whose members say they are a "gang for justice," started in 2006 as a sisterhood of sorts that looked out for victims of domestic abuse, a problem the United Nations estimates affects two in three married Indian women. Named after their hot-pink sari uniforms, the gang paid visits to abusive husbands and demanded they stop the beatings. When obstinate men refused to listen, the gulabis would return with large bamboo sticks called laathis and "persuade" them to change their ways. "When I go around with a stick, it's to make men fear me. I don't always use it, but it helps change the mind of men who think they are more powerful than me" says Pal. She has assumed the rank of commander in chief and has appointed district commanders across seven districts in Bundelkhand to help coordinate the gang's efforts.

Pal's group now has more than 20,000 members, and the number is growing. Making her way from one far-flung village to another on an old rusty bicycle, she holds daily gatherings under shady banyan trees, near makeshift tea-stalls selling the sweet Indian drink chai and other popular village hangouts to discuss local problems and attract new recruits.

Pal has a long list of criminal charges against her, including unlawful assembly, rioting, attacking a government employee, and obstructing an officer in the discharge of duty, and she even had to go into hiding. Her feistiness has secured notable victories for the community, however. In 2008, the group ambushed the local electricity office, which was withholding electricity until members received bribes or sexual favors in return for flicking the switch back on. The stick-wielding gulabi stormed the company grounds and proceeded to rough up the staff inside the building. An hour later, the power was back on in the village.

While the gulabi use a mild level of force, more violent strains of vigilantism have been reported elsewhere in India among dispossessed women. In 2004, a mob of hundreds of women hacked to death the serial rapist and murderer Akku Yadav, after the courts failed to convict him over a period of 10 years. After the deed was done, the women collectively declared their guilt in the murder, frustrating police efforts to charge anyone with the crime. This kind of violence has generated concern among some Indian commentators, who say that while many vigilantes have noble intentions, too many of them are brutally violent.

What's the context for this phenomenon? The Indian press often points to a host of ills plaguing modern India, such as honor killings, dowries, child marriages, and female feticide. These account for female despondency but not for the gangs as an outlet for it. In the past, many Indian women would have taken these pressures out on themselves, through self-immolation or hanging, for example. As women have gained political power, through initiatives like the affirmative-action bill, dispossessed rural women have realized that they can instead respond boldly and collectively to abuse. Why aren't they turning to political activism as opposed to vigilantism? To begin with, the gangs offer more immediate benefits than politics does. Another reason is that female politicians rising to power from the lower castes have been dismal role models. These politicians have the potential to inspire poor women more than dynastic leaders like Sonia Gandhi, but they have disappointed the women they claim to represent by being as corrupt and criminal as the male politicians they despise.

Read the full story HERE.

Gail Dines Book “Pornland” and How Pornography Destroys Intimacy and Hijacks Sexuality

I saw a link to this interview on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. Gail Dines is professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College and an expert on pornography. Dines' book Pornland looks at the effects of contemporary pornography on society. It's a pretty sobering assessment and an interesting interview. An interview excerpt:

PULSE

In the preface of your book, you share a personal story about a conversation you had with your son over pornography. You write, “I said [to him] that should he decide to use porn, that he was going to hand over his sexuality—a sexuality that he had yet to grow into, that made sense for who he was and who he was going to be—to someone else.” How and why do boys and young men give their power away to pornography? What kind of power does pornography have in shaping boys’ and men’s perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs toward sex?


Boys and men don’t realize the power they’re giving away to pornography. They don’t understand the power it has to shape who they are, their sexuality, and their sexual identity. In this culture, we think of pornography as a joke or something to laugh about. We don’t take it seriously as a source of information that has the ability and power to impact on the way we think about the world. Most boys and men go to pornography for an ejaculation; they come away with a lot more. I don’t think they’re quite aware of it.

Pornography, like all images, tells stories about the world. It tells stories about women, men, sexuality, and intimacy. In pornography, intimacy is something to be avoided, and—as I say in the book—“In pornography nobody makes love. They all make hate.” The man makes hate to the woman’s body. It’s about the destruction of intimacy.

Is it true that what most boys and men see in current trends of pornography are things that they expect in sex? How did that happen, and how is it impacting on boys’ and men’s perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs toward sex?

Well, a lot of people don’t know what pornography is. The first thing I do in the book is very purposefully describe it in detail. I know that for many people it’s going to be hard to read. I understand that. But if you’re really going to understand what I’m saying and why I’m saying it, then you have to understand the material I’m talking about. A lot of older men and women think I’m talking about Playboy from 15 years ago: a centerfold or a woman with no clothes on smiling in a cornfield. They think, “What’s wrong with that?” Well, that was bad enough in the way it objectified women, but we’re on a whole new level now with this kind of imagery.

How it got to this point is the Internet. It made it more accessible, affordable, and anonymous. You’re seeing a massive rise in use, and the users are getting younger and younger. Children who are 11½ years old are now looking at pornography because it comes straight into the home. There’s no limit on how much you can access. It used to be you had to steal father’s Playboy or Penthouse. Use was limited to how much you could actually pilfer. Today it is unlimited.

So what happens is that desensitization sets in that much quicker and that much earlier. In order to keep the consumer base going, the pornographers have to keep upping the ante. They make it more violent, body-punishing, or abusive as a way to keep men interested. When you think about it, if you’re exposed to it at age 11 or 12, you’re jaded by 20. You’re certainly jaded by 30. Pornography bleeds sex dry of intimacy, emotions, and connection. Once you do that, then there’s not much left. It becomes boring and mechanical. So you have to keep feeding newer and newer ideas just to keep [the audience] interested.

You describe Gonzo porn as “body-punishing sex.” Why is it body-punishing, why is it prevalent today, and what do people need to know about it?

It’s body-punishing because the male performers pound away at a woman’s body. You often see three men orally, vaginally, and anally penetrate her over and over again for 20 minutes or more, and these are often Viagra-fortified penises, so they stay hard much longer. A woman’s body has limits. All of ours do. What you see in Gonzo porn is a woman’s anus that is red and sore and a swollen vagina. All of these things happen because of the way a woman’s body is treated. Even the pornography industry says that Gonzo is very demanding and potentially dangerous for women. If the industry is saying it, then there’s certainly a problem.

What I’ve found with my interviews with men is the more they watch, the more they want porn sex, because they become habituated to that kind of industrial-strength sex. Once you become habituated to that, anything else looks boring or uninteresting. What I find is that some men lose interest in their partners altogether and use more pornography. Other men nag and cajole their girlfriends to perform porn sex, or they use prostitutes because that’s who they think they can play this porn sex out on.

Remember that you are not just reading or looking at porn. You’re actively masturbating and having an orgasm to it. It has a very visceral response in the body. This is one of the reasons it is so powerful.

How/why does pornography misuse and abuse the concepts of sex and how/why does pornography normalize the idea that pain is pleasure?

Well, it’s because of the way the woman’s body is treated. In pornography, no matter what you do to her, no matter how much you physically or verbally abuse this woman, she loves it. She can’t get enough. What I find fascinating and upsetting at the same time is…

Men believe that!

… That’s right. They believe it. I’ve had men argue with me that they believe women like it. So when I say to them, “What’s your evidence? Have you seen any empirical studies? Have you interviewed these women?” No, of course they haven’t. They’re using the text as their evidence because she’s saying “I love it! Give it to me harder!,” when of course she has no choice. First of all, she wants to get paid. She has to say that, and if she wants to continue working in pornography, she has no choice.

Read the entire interview HERE.

Outlawing the Burqa?

A bunch of discussion and feedback at Sullivan's Daily Dish blog.

The Hitchens quote that kicked it off is HERE.

and MORE on his thread.

Slate on Brittney Griner, Femininity, and Women's Basketball Athletes

Slam Dunks and Nail Polish: Brittney Griner and the feminine dilemma of women's basketball.

By Hanna Rosin
Posted Tuesday, April 6, 2010, at 1:42 PM ET

SLATE

On Sunday before each of the women's NCAA Tournament semifinals, ESPN aired a let's-get-to-know-our-players clip. This makes sense given the relative obscurity of women's basketball players. The real agenda, however, seemed to be to convince viewers that these players are actually women. Each bio clip unfolds like fairy-tale dress-up: A player appears in her daytime clothes, and then—with the help of some presto twirl magic—in her basketball uniform. Stanford's Rosalyn Gold-Onwude is "something like a diva," she says, giggling and vamping in her flirty fuchsia dress. Her teammate Jeanette Pohlen says she "owns over 90 colors of nail polish," and Cardinal center Jayne Appel confesses that her favorite day at the sorority house is "sandwich day." Baylor's Morghan Medlock, dressed in a pink stripy tank top and headband, says she likes to shop. Once the women change into their basketball clothes, they shift their focus from the mall to the court. "I'm a nightmare on the glass," Medlock says.

The result is a confusing mishmash of girl-power messages, something like the sounds that emit from working-woman talking Barbie—"I have e-mail!" and then "I can't wait to go dancing with Ken!" Brittney Griner, the 6-foot-8 freshman from Baylor University, could never be excluded from these getting-to-know-you intros because she is, as the announcers declare, "the talk of the tournament." But she does not exactly fit the bill. She looks pretty much the same pre-twirl as post-twirl, in black pants and a black T-shirt. She smiles shyly and says in her deep voice, "I'm Brittney Griner, and I love bacon." (At least that's what it sounds like—it's hard to tell from the clip.) In the final parade of lady players, she flexes her muscles in the center as her shorter teammates pose around her.

In theory, the women's tournament should be a time to celebrate the vast array of women's talents and body types. True, these women do not play nearly as hard and fast as their male counterparts. Still, it is a genuine pleasure to watch these Amazons display the fierce concentration and physical fearlessness we are so used to seeing from men. This is the lofty spirit of Title IX—that even in spheres we have long considered the exclusive domain of macho, women can hold their own. I always try to make my daughter watch a few minutes of replay, and talk to her about the players as if they are civil rights heroes like Rosa Parks.

But women's college basketball, like many professional women's sports, often seems uncomfortable with its own unconventional version of femininity. In the WNBA, the Washington Mystics don't have a "Kiss Cam" during timeouts because some fans might get offended by lesbian smooching. "We got a lot of kids here. We just don't find it appropriate," Sheila Johnson, the team's managing partner, explained last year. The league's rookie orientation has included seminars on fashion, hair, and makeup. "It's all contributing to how to be a professional," WNBA president Donna Orender said about the beauty sessions. To grow its audience—and to avoid the perception that it's a sport exclusively played by and marketed to lesbians—women's basketball gets packaged as a wholesome family sport replete with all-American ladies. But that aspiration limits the range of possible feminine archetypes.

Into this dilemma walks Griner, a freshman phenom who dunks, wears size 17 men's shoes, and has a wingspan of 86 inches. If anything can save women's basketball from obscurity, Griner is it. The University of Connecticut's team, which beat Baylor Sunday night, has a 77-game winning streak and great players in Maya Moore and Tina Charles. But Moore and Charles do not stand out like Brittney Griner. The Baylor star was universally ranked as the top recruit when she came out of her Texas high school last year. In her senior year, she dunked the ball 52 times in 32 games. In her first college season she's already set records for blocked shots, and her four dunks aren't far off from Candace Parker's career college record of seven. After Sunday night's game against UConn, Huskies head coach Geno Auriemma whispered his congratulations to Griner and said he hoped to coach her one day, maybe in the Olympics. After their conversation, Griner broke out into a big smile.

But Griner fits no one's idea of traditional femininity. In a close-up head shot her features look quite delicate. But this only makes it more shocking to hear her voice, which is deep and husky and outside what we register as a feminine range. Off the court, she dresses and walks in a way that would probably not be greeted with approval at a WNBA rookie orientation beauty seminar. .....

Read the full post, plus audio, images, and links HERE.

2009 article on "Plus Size" Model in Glamour

I have to say that I'm glad they put quote marks around the word "plus"; if they didn't, I would have.

Newsweek
THE HUMAN CONDITION
Posted Friday, August 21, 2009 7:29 AM

The Woman on Page 194: Why Everyone is Talking About Glamour's "Plus"-Sized Model

by Jessica Bennett

It’s a three-by-three inch image that shows an stunning model, blond and smiling, photographed for a story about feeling comfortable in your skin. The girl is naked save for a thong bikini, juxtaposed against tips like "focus on the parts you love" and "your body doesn't deserve to be bashed!" The spread is typical of the women's magazines I normally roll my eyes at: "self esteem" squeezed between pages of emaciated cheekbones, jutting shoulder blades and gangly arms.

Except that this time, I do a double-take. The girl on page 194 of the September issue of Glamour is Lizzi Miller, a 20-year-old model with—get ready—a roll in her stomach. Yes, I really wrote that: she has a roll of fat, as well as some faint stretch marks and sturdy looking thighs. And the moment her photo hit newsstands, Glamour readers noticed. "Finally! A picture of a REAL woman!" proclaimed one online commenter. "This photo made me want to shout from the rooftops," wrote another. "I really hope this starts a revolution," someone chimed in. As Glamour Editor Cindi Leive told NEWSWEEK, “I knew readers would like this, but I have to admit I was floored by the intensity of the reaction." (You can read more about what Leive had to say about “The Woman on P. 194” on her blog.)

Lizzi Miller is a pretty girl with a pretty ordinary body—the kind most of us see daily when we look in the mirror. At 5'11 and 180 pounds, she has a body mass index (a weight-for-height formula used to measure obesity) of 25.1, which is two-tenths of a point above what the National Institute of Health deems "normal." The average American female, meanwhile, has a BMI of 26.5, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Miller is more like most of us than the emaciated models we're used to seeing. So why has her image hit such a nerve?

Because, well, the fatter we get, the more obsessed we are with being thin. And as the bloggers over at Jezebel point out, seeing a regular-sized woman in a magazine like Glamour is, today, a radical departure from the norm. We are a culture where the Karl Lagerfelds of the world proclaim Kate Moss too fat; where the latest fashions and weight-loss products are circulated by the media with a speed and fury unique to this millennium. We are spoon-fed hundreds of advertisements each day—the majority of them nipped, tucked and airbrushed to perfection. And what we're left with is a culture of women who are socialized to unrealistic images—and "hungry," says Glamour's Leive, "for reality."

>>>>>>>>>

Read the full story HERE.

New Biopic about Female Rock Pioneers The Runaways

NYT has a positive review of the film starring Dakota Fanning HERE, but the photo of the real Runaways (featuring future stars Joan Jett and Lita Ford) is a killer:

Controversy Over Changing Lyrics of Canadian National Anthem (O Canada)

CBC News

O Canada lyrics to be reviewed
Last Updated: Wednesday, March 3, 2010 | 6:28 PM ET

Get ready to memorize new words to the national anthem.

Parliament is to be asked to review the "original gender-neutral wording of the national anthem," says the throne speech delivered by Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean on Wednesday.

O Canada includes the lyrics "true patriot love in all thy sons command," and there may be interest in changing that line to something more inclusive.

O Canada, with music composed by Calixa Lavallée in 1880, became the national anthem in 1980, replacing God Save the Queen.

Its English lyrics have been adapted several times over the years, but the current version is based on a poem written in 1908 by Stanley Weir.

It begins: "O Canada Our home and native land! True patriot love thou dost in us command. We see thee rising fair, dear land, The True North strong and free."

The official English version now in use incorporates changes recommended in 1968 by a joint committee of MPs and senators that added the lines "from far and wide" and "God keep our land glorious and free!"

The surprise proposal to review the lyrics had parliamentary observers buzzing. The throne speech gave no indication what prompted the plan.

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said the initiative to change the lyrics is the kind of "symbolic gesture" the Conservative government makes when it doesn't want to do anything real.

"Anything that makes a national anthem more gender-sensitive is a good thing," he told CBC News.

"But, I mean, no disrespect to those who feel strongly on this issue, but, for heaven's sake, we have some very important challenges and every time the government is asked to do something real, it does something symbolic.

"There's lots of things to do for women that are more important than changing the words of the national anthem, just as there are lots of things to do for pensioners and seniors that are more important than having a Seniors Day."

********
O Canada official lyrics

O Canada! Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command.

With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free!

From far and wide, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

God keep our land glorious and free! O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee


And here is a story on the pushback.

Slate defends Lindsey Vonn's bikini photo shoot vis-a-vis the preferred olympic beauties (figure skaters)

Interesting article in SLATE comparing Olympic ski champion Lindsey Vonn's bikini photo shoot for Sports Illustrated to the usual female athlete darlings of the olympics: figure skaters. This was written before Vonn's breathtaking victory in the downhill, as was this good background story in the NYT.

SLATE
five-ring circus
Bunny Slope
Think Lindsey Vonn's bikini photos are exploitative? At least she's not an ice princess in a short skirt.
By Hanna Rosin
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2010, at 12:24 PM ET

It's safe to say that Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn, who's scheduled to make her Vancouver debut on Wednesday, has upped her male viewership with her extensive spread in Sports Illustrated's latest swimsuit issue. [Update, Feb. 17: In her first race of the Winter Games, Vonn took the gold medal in the women's downhill.] In the 45 photos posted on SI.com, Vonn offers up the fantasy of Vail mistress by vamping her way through all the bikini clichés: bikini in the snow, bikini in bed, bikini next to big whirring machine, bikini (whoops!) slipping down, bikini in the sauna, legs slightly spread, etc. It's appalling, really, that the poster girl for the U.S. Olympics team, a woman whose promise is compared to Michael Phelps', should behave for all the world like a Playboy bunny. Or at least it's appalling until we consider the alternative for a female Winter Olympian: a role as a pixie whose notion of sexy involves sparkly outfits and blue eye shadow.

For the last few Winter Games the figure skaters have served as the darlings of American Olympics coverage. In the last decade, much of the publicity has gone to Michelle Kwan, who attended her first Olympics at the vulnerable age of 13. During the mid-1990s, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan sucked up all the attention with their on the rink, off the rink hysterical dramas. Watching pairs skating these last few nights has reminded me of what the figure skating narrative is all about: tender young fawns gliding to maudlin music, getting thrown around, and landing on frail ankles. The vibe is more Virgin Suicides than professional sports and is thus, from the teach-your-daughters point of view, problematic.

This year, for various reasons, the United States does not have a figure skating star who has captured the media's heart. The Japanese and South Koreans dominate the competition, with the Chinese and Russians not far behind. Instead, the American media have settled for Vonn, a 25-year-old hearty blonde whose legs—in the nonbikini photo shoots—look like they could easily shove a truck down a hill. Vonn, too, has shown some vulnerability in her pre-Olympics media opportunities. She went on the Today show last week to confess she had a "deep muscle bruise" that made it difficult even to put on her ski boot. But this was not the bury-your-head-in-your-partner's-chest-and–manage-a-brave-smile operatic vulnerability that the skaters are so good at. Instead, it was the kind of honest emotionalism you might hear from professional football players if they were free to talk about their injuries. The end result was just to increase the legend of Vonn as a tough broad who will ski through any amount of pain. (She has since said she is OK to compete.)

No doubt, female figure skaters train with just as much grit and determination as skiers. But the Olympics—particularly the Olympics as covered by network television—allows for a limited number of tropes, and the one assigned to skiers (female gladiator) is far preferable to the one assigned to skaters (tragic nymph). Feminist academics have long agonized over what little girls learn by idolizing figure skaters, as Ellyn Kestnbaum explains in Culture on Ice: Figure Skating and Cultural Meaning. The sport, they argue, rates femininity over talent, so Harding lost to Kerrigan, and then Kerrigan succumbed to the daintier Oksana Baiul. They are weepy heroines, trapped in a fairy tale—ice princesses spinning for gold. They dress like music box ballerinas, in outfits that suggest both prude and tart. Skating rules forbid bare midriffs and require "skirts and pants covering the hips and posterior." Skaters have played with this rule by interpreting "pants" as nude tights and by wearing skirts that cover the posterior when the skater is standing still but fly up when they jump.

....

There have been other Olympians in the Lindsey Vonn mold. Picabo Street, a friend of Vonn's, won a gold medal in the 1998 Winter Olympics. Speed skater Bonnie Blair is tied with Apolo Ohno as the American with the most medals in the Winter Olympics. Hannah Kearney, who won the gold in moguls this week, seemed deeply appealing, showing up for her post-race interview swinging her sneakers. But their fame does not tend to stick. The skaters hog all the glory, performing in shows, appearing in commercials into a ripe old age. Dorothy Hamill is still a household name and was just hired by Vaseline to shill their new face cream. Bonnie Blair, despite her record, is mostly unknown. Street is retired and raising her children.

......

One of the reasons skaters have enduring appeal is that they get to show their bodies. The camera lingers on their theatrical expressions, their arched backs, their perfect calves. We watch them as they wait to receive their scores, smiling and weeping on camera for minutes on end. Skiers, meanwhile, charge down the mountain so fast you can barely see them. They're also covered up from head to toe, with even their expressions hidden behind goggles. Unless NBC makes her the subject of a soft-focus feature, you might not get to see a skier's face until she's standing at the podium receiving her medal. For those still offended by Vonn's photo shoot, think of it this way: By posing in a bikini, she has just evened the playing field.

Read the whole story (plus discussion and lots of links) HERE.

Japan's Rebellious Cultural "Herbavores" [slate]

SLATE
[click on original for hyperlinks]

foreigners
The Herbivore's Dilemma
Japan panics about the rise of "grass-eating men," who shun sex, don't spend money, and like taking walks.
By Alexandra Harney
Posted Monday, June 15, 2009, at 2:04 PM ET

Ryoma Igarashi likes going for long drives through the mountains, taking photographs of Buddhist temples and exploring old neighborhoods. He's just taken up gardening, growing radishes in a planter in his apartment. Until recently, Igarashi, a 27-year-old Japanese television presenter, would have been considered effeminate, even gay. Japanese men have long been expected to live like characters on Mad Men, chasing secretaries, drinking with the boys, and splurging on watches, golf, and new cars.

Today, Igarashi has a new identity (and plenty of company among young Japanese men) as one of the soushoku danshi—literally translated, "grass-eating boys." Named for their lack of interest in sex and their preference for quieter, less competitive lives, Japan's "herbivores" are provoking a national debate about how the country's economic stagnation since the early 1990s has altered men's behavior.

Newspapers, magazines, and television shows are newly fixated on the herbivores. "Have men gotten weaker?" was one theme of a recent TV talk show. "Herbivores Aren't So Bad" is the title of a regular column on the Japanese Web site NB Online.

In this age of bromance and metrosexuals, why all the fuss? The short answer is that grass-eating men are alarming because they are the nexus between two of the biggest challenges facing Japanese society: the declining birth rate and anemic consumption. Herbivores represent an unspoken rebellion against many of the masculine, materialist values associated with Japan's 1980s bubble economy. Media Shakers, a consulting company that is a subsidiary of Dentsu, the country's largest advertising agency, estimates that 60 percent of men in their early 20s and at least 42 percent of men aged 23 to 34 consider themselves grass-eating men. Partner Agent, a Japanese dating agency, found in a survey that 61 percent of unmarried men in their 30s identified themselves as herbivores. Of the 1,000 single men in their 20s and 30s polled by Lifenet, a Japanese life-insurance company, 75 percent described themselves as grass-eating men.

Japanese companies are worried that herbivorous boys aren't the status-conscious consumers their parents once were. They love to putter around the house. According to Media Shakers' research, they are more likely to want to spend time by themselves or with close friends, more likely to shop for things to decorate their homes, and more likely to buy little luxuries than big-ticket items. They prefer vacationing in Japan to venturing abroad. They're often close to their mothers and have female friends, but they're in no rush to get married themselves, according to Maki Fukasawa, the Japanese editor and columnist who coined the term in NB Online in 2006.

Grass-eating boys' commitment phobia is not the only thing that's worrying Japanese women. Unlike earlier generations of Japanese men, they prefer not to make the first move, they like to split the bill, and they're not particularly motivated by sex. "I spent the night at one guy's house, and nothing happened—we just went to sleep!" moaned one incredulous woman on a TV program devoted to herbivores. "It's like something's missing with them," said Yoko Yatsu, a 34-year-old housewife, in an interview. "If they were more normal, they'd be more interested in women. They'd at least want to talk to women."

Shigeru Sakai of Media Shakers suggests that grass-eating men don't pursue women because they are bad at expressing themselves. He attributes their poor communication skills to the fact that many grew up without siblings in households where both parents worked. "Because they had TVs, stereos and game consoles in their bedrooms, it became more common for them to shut themselves in their rooms when they got home and communicate less with their families, which left them with poor communication skills," he wrote in an e-mail. (Japan has rarely needed its men to have sex as much as it does now. Low birth rates, combined with a lack of immigration, have caused the country's population to shrink every year since 2005.)

It may be that Japan's efforts to make the workplace more egalitarian planted the seeds for the grass-eating boys, says Fukasawa. In the wake of Japan's 1985 Equal Employment Opportunity Law, women assumed greater responsibility at work, and the balance of power between the sexes began to shift. Though there are still significant barriers to career advancement for women, a new breed of female executive who could party almost as hard as her male colleagues emerged. Office lechery, which had been socially acceptable, became stigmatized as seku hara, or sexual harassment.

But it was the bursting of Japan's bubble in the early 1990s, coupled with this shift in the social landscape, that made the old model of Japanese manhood unsustainable. Before the bubble collapsed, Japanese companies offered jobs for life. Salarymen who knew exactly where their next paycheck was coming from were more confident buying a Tiffany necklace or an expensive French dinner for their girlfriend. Now, nearly 40 percent of Japanese work in nonstaff positions with much less job security.

"When the economy was good, Japanese men had only one lifestyle choice: They joined a company after they graduated from college, got married, bought a car, and regularly replaced it with a new one," says Fukasawa. "Men today simply can't live that stereotypical 'happy' life."

Yoto Hosho, a 22-year-old college dropout who considers himself and most of his friends herbivores, believes the term describes a diverse group of men who have no desire to live up to traditional social expectations in their relationships with women, their jobs, or anything else. "We don't care at all what people think about how we live," he says.

Many of Hosho's friends spend so much time playing computer games that they prefer the company of cyber women to the real thing. And the Internet, he says, has helped make alternative lifestyles more acceptable. Hosho believes that the lines between men and women in his generation have blurred. He points to the popularity of "boys love," a genre of manga and novels written for women about romantic relationships between men that has spawned its own line of videos, computer games, magazines, and cafes where women dress as men.

Fukasawa contends that while some grass-eating men may be gay, many are not. Nor are they metrosexuals. Rather, their behavior reflects a rejection of both the traditional Japanese definition of masculinity and what she calls the West's "commercialization" of relationships, under which men needed to be macho and purchase products to win a woman's affection. Some Western concepts, like going to dinner parties as a couple, never fit easily into Japanese culture, she says. Others never even made it into the language—the term "ladies first," for instance, is usually said in English in Japan. During Japan's bubble economy, "Japanese people had to live according to both Western standards and Japanese standards," says Fukasawa. "That trend has run its course."

Japanese women are not taking the herbivores' indifference lightly. In response to the herbivorous boys' tepidity, "carnivorous girls" are taking matters into their own hands, pursuing men more aggressively. Also known as "hunters," these women could be seen as Japan's version of America's cougars.

While many Japanese women might disagree, Fukasawa sees grass-eating boys as a positive development for Japanese society. She notes that before World War II, herbivores were more common: Novelists such as Osamu Dazai and Soseki Natsume would have been considered grass-eating boys. But in the postwar economic boom, men became increasingly macho, increasingly hungry for products to mark their personal economic progress. Young Japanese men today are choosing to have less to prove.

Alexandra Harney is the author of The China Price and a regular commentator on Japanese television.

Groundbreaking Female Flutist Frances Blaisdell dies at 97

NYT


March 31, 2009
Frances Blaisdell, ‘Girl Flutist’ Who Opened Doors, Dies at 97
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Frances Blaisdell, a flutist who played her way into what was then the male world of orchestral music, becoming one of the early women to play a woodwind instrument with the New York Philharmonic, died on March 11 in Portola Valley, Calif. She was 97.

Her son, John, announced her death.

In addition to playing with the Philharmonic, Ms. Blaisdell performed with prominent chamber ensembles, on Broadway, at Radio City Music Hall, in vaudeville, and with Phil Spitalny and His All-Girl Orchestra on the “Hour of Charm” on CBS and NBC radio. She also taught generations of leading flutists.

“I had lots of opportunities because I was sort of a freak, and people couldn’t imagine a girl flutist,” she said in an interview printed in The Flutist Quarterly in 2005.

Chamber Music magazine suggested in 1992 that she was considerably more than that, saying, “Every woman flute player in every major American orchestra, every little girl who pays the flute in a school band, has Frances Blaisdell to thank. She was first.”

Ms. Blaisdell had to overcome the mixed feelings of her father to become a professional; proud of her talent, he feared that as a woman, she would not survive as a player. He was in the lumber business, but his own love was the flute, and he started teaching her to play when she was 5. He wished she were a boy and called her Jim, she said in The Flutist Quarterly interview, which first appeared in the New York Flute Club newsletter. Ms. Blaisdell wrote to Ernest Wagner, a flutist with the New York Philharmonic, to ask if he would teach “Jim.”

When she appeared for her lesson, she said, Mr. Wagner refused to teach her, saying there was no future for a woman trying to play the flute in orchestras. But he finally agreed to six lessons, and then more.

Ms. Blaisdell’s father wanted her to pursue a career, but saw no future for her in music. He gave her the choice of being a teacher, nurse or secretary. She persuaded him that since she was graduating at 16, two years early, she should spend the two years pursuing her dream.

“Two years, but not another day,” he said.

So in 1928 she wrote Georges Barrère, the great French flutist, who taught at what is now Juilliard. She was given an appointment, perhaps because her name had been taken down as “Francis.” She was admitted with a scholarship.

Ms. Blaisdell later studied with two other giants of the flute, Marcel Moyse and William Kincaid. In 1941, after Barrère had a stroke, she took his place in the Barrère Trio.

In 1930, she became first flute of the National Orchestral Association and soon joined Barrère to play Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 under the baton of Walter Damrosch at Madison Square Garden. She was first flute in the New Opera Company and in the New Friends of Music.

On Nov. 26, 1932, she was the soloist with the Philharmonic at a children’s concert, playing Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 2 in D major. Josh Marcum, a spokesman for the Philharmonic, confirmed the appearance.

But in 1937, she was refused an audition for an opening as assistant first flute of the Philharmonic because she was a woman. In 1962, she said, she became one of the first women to play a woodwind with the Philharmonic, when a piece demanded extra flutes. Mr. Marcum said this was possible, but not provable.

In 1937, Ms. Blaisdell married Alexander Williams, first clarinetist for the Philharmonic. They and three other Philharmonic players formed the Blaisdell Woodwind Quintet, which had a radio series. Mr. Williams died in 2003.

In addition to her son, Frances Louise Blaisdell is survived by her daughter, Alexandra Hawley; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Ms. Blaisdell played several concerts with the soprano Lily Pons, providing the requisite flute trills that accompany many showpieces for a coloratura soprano, and taught at the Manhattan School of Music, among other places. In 1973, she moved to California, where she taught at Stanford for 35 years.

Ms. Blaisdell adapted to the show business side of classical music. She said she wore a beautiful gold lamé dress at Radio City Music Hall for five shows a day in 1934 or 1935. She had two Rockettes on each side of her. Still, she was deathly frightened the first time she gazed into the immense black space, which looked, she said, like the “caverns of hell.”

A Rockette nudged her and said, “Get going, kid, and smile.”

Ms. Blaisdell did. After a couple of shows, it was easy."

As Taboos Ease, Saudi Girl Group Dares to Rock

NYT
November 24, 2008
Jidda Journal
As Taboos Ease, Saudi Girl Group Dares to Rock
By ROBERT F. WORTH

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — They cannot perform in public. They cannot pose for album cover photographs. Even their jam sessions are secret, for fear of offending the religious authorities in this ultraconservative kingdom.

But the members of Saudi Arabia’s first all-girl rock band, the Accolade, are clearly not afraid of taboos.

The band’s first single, “Pinocchio,” has become an underground hit here, with hundreds of young Saudis downloading the song from the group’s Web site. Now, the pioneering foursome, all of them college students, want to start playing regular gigs — inside private compounds, of course — and recording an album.

“In Saudi, yes, it’s a challenge,” said the group’s lead singer, Lamia, who has piercings on her left eyebrow and beneath her bottom lip. (Like other band members, she gave only her first name.) “Maybe we’re crazy. But we wanted to do something different.”

In a country where women are not allowed to drive and rarely appear in public without their faces covered, the band is very different. The prospect of female rockers clutching guitars and belting out angry lyrics about a failed relationship — the theme of “Pinocchio” — would once have been unimaginable here.

But this country’s harsh code of public morals has slowly thawed, especially in Jidda, by far the kingdom’s most cosmopolitan city. A decade ago the cane-wielding religious police terrorized women who were not dressed according to their standards. Young men with long hair were sometimes bundled off to police stations to have their heads shaved, or worse.

Today, there is a growing rock scene with dozens of bands, some of them even selling tickets to their performances. Hip-hop is also popular. The religious police — strictly speaking, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice — have largely retreated from the streets of Jidda and are somewhat less aggressive even in the kingdom’s desert heartland.

The change has been especially noticeable since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when the Saudis confronted the effects of extremism both outside and inside the kingdom. More than 60 percent of Saudi Arabia’s population is under 25, and many of the young are pressing for greater freedoms.

“The upcoming generation is different from the one before,” said Dina, the Accolade’s 21-year-old guitarist and founder. “Everything is changing. Maybe in 10 years it’s going to be O.K. to have a band with live performances.”

Dina said she first dreamed of starting a band three years ago. In September, she and her sister Dareen, 19, who plays bass, teamed up with Lamia and Amjad, the keyboardist.

They were already iconoclasts: Dina and Dareen wear their hair teased into thick manes and have pierced eyebrows. During an interview at a Starbucks here, they wore black abayas — the flowing gown that is standard attire for women — but the gowns were open, showing their jeans and T-shirts, and their hair and faces were uncovered. Women are more apt to go uncovered in Jidda than in most other parts of the country, though it is still uncommon.

“People always stare at us,” Dareen said, giggling. She and her sister are also avid ice skaters, another unusual habit in Saudi Arabia’s desert.

The band gets together to practice every weekend at the sisters’ house, where their younger brother sometimes fills in on drums. In early November, Dina, who studies art at King Abdulaziz University, began writing a song based on one of her favorite paintings, “The Accolade,” by the English pre-Raphaelite painter Edmund Blair Leighton. The painting depicts a long-haired noblewoman knighting a young warrior with a sword.

“I liked the painting because it shows a woman who is satisfied with a man,” Dina said.

She had thought of writing a song based on “Last Supper” by Leonardo da Vinci but decided that doing so would be taking controversy too far. In Saudi Arabia, churches are not allowed, and Muslims who convert to Christianity can be executed.

Dina held out her cellphone to show a video of the band practicing at home. It looked like a garage-band jam session anywhere in the world, with the sisters hunching over their instruments, their brother blasting away at the drums and Lamia clutching a microphone.

“We’re looking for a drummer,” Lamia said. “Five guys have offered, but we really want the band to be all female.”

Although they know they are doing something unusual, in person the band members seem more playful than provocative. Unlike some of the wealthier Saudi youth who have lived abroad and tasted Western life, they are middle class and have never left their country.

“What we’re doing — it’s not something wrong, it’s art, and we’re doing it in a good way,” Dina said. “We respect our traditions.”

All the members are quick to add that they disapprove of smoking, drinking and drugs.

“You destroy yourself with that,” Lamia said.

Yet rock and roll itself is suspect in Saudi Arabia in part because of its association with decadent lifestyles. Most of the bands here play heavy metal, which has only added to the stigma because of the way some Western heavy metal bands use images linked to satanism or witchcraft. In Saudi Arabia, people are sometimes imprisoned and even executed on charges of practicing witchcraft.

The first rock bands appeared here about 20 years ago, according to Hassan Hatrash, 34, a journalist and bass player who was one of the pioneers, and their numbers gradually grew. Then in 1995, the police raided a performance in the basement of a restaurant in Jidda, hauling about 300 young men off to jail, including Mr. Hatrash. They were released a few days later without being charged. There is no actual law against playing rock music or performing publicly.

“After that, the scene kind of died,” he said.

Mr. Hatrash, who has graying shoulder-length hair, recalled how the religious police used to harass young men who advertised their interest in rock and roll. He once had his head was shaved by the police.

In recent years, with the religious police on the defensive, bands have begun to play concerts, and a few have recorded albums. Occasionally young men bring their guitars and play outside the cafes on Tahlia Street in Jidda, where young people tend to congregate in the evenings.

Although the music is mostly familiar to heavy metal fans anywhere — thrashing guitars and howling vocals — some of the lyrics reflect the special challenges of life and love in this puritanical country.

“And I Don’t Know Why,” a song by Mr. Hatrash’s band, Most of Us, has these lyrics:

Why is it always so hard to get to you

When it’s something we both want to do

Every time we have to create an alibi

So that we can meet and love or at least try...

As the Saudi rock scene grew, Dina gathered the courage to start her own band. It plans to move slowly, she said, with “jams for ladies only” at first. The band members’ parents support them, though they have asked them to keep things low-key. Eventually, Dina said, they hope to play real concerts, perhaps in Dubai.

“It’s important for them to see what we’re capable of,” she said.