Too pretty to do my homework so my brother does it for me!

Many of us are familiar with the arguably - no, definitely - sexist t-shirts adorning the torsos of college-aged males recently. Usually the shirts are a solid color with a slogan in the middle - slogans like "I'm the one you gotta blow to get a drink around here," "Nice new girlfriend - what breed is she?," "Nice legs - when do they open?," and "Tomorrow I'll be sober - but you'll still be ugly." Check out this gallery; you will find a plethora of them.

They are even described as "sexist" on the site that sells them. Men think they are hilarious and wear them with pride.

But it's not just men - women are wearing them too. Take, for example, the pink shirts that say, "Allergic to Algebra," "If you want it done right ask a brunette," and "Who needs brains when you have these?" (the latter placed strategically over the breasts). For both male and female shirts, the slogans generally focus on sexually objectifying women, a concept that certainly isn't new or surprising.

What is new, and becoming disturbingly more prevalent, is the marketing of sexist clothing to adolescents, kids, and even infants. This fall, the baby apparel company Gymboree unveiled online a new line of onesies that had parents up in arms. The onesies marketed for little boys read, "Smart Like Dad" while those marketed for little girls read, "Pretty Like Mommy." These gender stereotypical messages immediately upset parents (or, should I say, moms). A petition was started and sent to Gymboree that noted that there were no "Smart Like Mommy" onesies and demanded that the company "stop selling clothing with harmful gender stereotypes immediately." Gymboree pulled the onesies off of their website.

But there remained some apparel that were still clearly marketed to boys as being "Daddy's MVP," "Adventure Seeker," or "Mr. Personality" and girls as being "Daddy's Little Cupcake, "A Little Bon Bon," or "MVP: Most Valuable Princess." Gymboree still has a boys line called "Smart Little Guy" which includes garb with math formulas and the label "genius" while girls get "Cozy Cutie," "Pretty Little Ice Skater," and, "Turtley Cute." Great, not only are they sending the message that looks are more important than brains, but they're also making up words like "turtley."

A few months before the Gymboree controversy, J.C. Penney put a girls' shirt (for girls aged 7-16) on the shelves that read, "I'm too pretty to do my homework so my brother does it for me." To make it even worse, the product description online read, "Who has time for homework when there's a new Justin Bieber album out? She'll love this tee that's just as cute and sassy as she is." A double-whammy: first the message that girls shouldn't care about their homework because their looks are more important, and second, that God-forbid girls be bothered with learning - they should spend their time obsessing over a boy!

Come on, J.C. Penney, did you really think you could get away with this? Well, they didn't. A woman named Lauren Todd started a petition on Change.org that demanded the company stop selling sexist clothes. The petition got thousands of signatures and the story was picked up by various news outlets, which put the pressure on J.C. Penney who eventually discontinued sales of the shirt and released the statement, "We agreed that the shirt does not deliver an appropriate message."

The message these shirts and onesies aren't just inappropriate, they're damaging. As Mary Elizabeth Williams points out, kids are force-fed gender stereotypes and expectations from the moment the enter the world. Girls' rooms are painted pink; boys' rooms blue. Girls are put in dresses, taught to be "lady-like;" boys are dressed in pants and taught to be "tough." The media bombards girls with "girly" products, and it continues into adulthood. Girls and women are taught to value material things such as brand-name purses, shoes, and jewelry. Further, the media pressures women with the "ideal" body: skinny with breasts like balloons, perfect hair, makeup, and tanned skin. This ideal is unrealistic yet it has become to important to attain for so many girls and women. Women are taught that looks are most important - make yourself look good, and you'll attract the attention of men. We are all aware of the implications of this body ideal: low self-esteem among young women, depression, eating disorders that sometimes lead to death. The younger the manipulation and stereotyping starts the worse it is. The companies marketing this type of clothing to young girls and babies are disgustingly irresponsible. They are entrenching even deeper the idea that girls are dumb and all that matters is appearance - we should leave the thinking to the boys.

Plan B still slightly out reach for women of child-bearing age.

On Wednesday, December 7, 2011, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s recommendation that women 16 and under can purchase Plan B, an emergency contraception, without a prescription. Sebelius explains in her statement that “In order for the contraception to be switched from prescription to over the counter, there must be “enough evidence to show that those who use this medicine can understand the label and use the product appropriately.” Sebelius believed that this standard was not met, and therefore, overruled the FDA’s recommendation for the prescription to over the counter switch.

At a press conference on December 08, 2011, President Obama was asked if he “personally intervened in any way in halting the sale of the "morning after" pill to those under 17, and whether you think politics trumps science in this case.” Obama made clear that he supports Sebelius’ decision and that the issue is about whether women 12-13 were capable of taking the medicine properly. If not taken properly the medicine can have adverse effects. Obama said that “[w]hen it comes to 12-year-olds or 13-year-olds, the question is can we have confidence that they would potentially use Plan B properly. And her judgment was that there was not enough evidence that this potentially could be used improperly in a way that had adverse health effects on those young people.”

Interestingly enough, the FDA maintains that it did take into account whether women 12-13 are capable of taking the medicine properly. Amy Nieman, the Vice President of Teva Women’s Health Inc, the company that submitted to the FDA the application for the drug to be made available over-the-counter said that “[p]art of FDA's consideration was a Teva-funded study that tracked 11- to 17-year-olds who came to clinics seeking emergency contraception. Nearly 90 percent of them used the pill safely and correctly without professional guidance.” But, as an Editorial in the L.A. Times points out, “Sebelius waited until the eleventh hour to make her decision, rather than asking the FDA for more data earlier in its deliberations.” With an eleventh hour move like that, one can’t help but ask if politics trumped science.

And science appears to be on the side of the FDA’s decision. In a recent statement, the Union of Concern Scientists expressed concern that Sebelius’ decision was a political move. “This is the first time a HHS secretary has overruled an FDA commissioner on a drug approval decision. Noting that Sebelius is not a scientists, the Director, Francisca Grifo, expressed concern that “The secretary’s decision undermines the ability of FDA to make drug approval decisions based on the best available science. The president’s support for the secretary’s decision is unfortunate, as it is inconsistent with his own March 2009 memorandum on scientific integrity.”

In the March 2009 statement Grifo refers to, Obama said science “must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health.” And one would be hard pressed to argue with his statement that the public must be “able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions.” However, this is one of those situations where the administration lost the public’s trust.

In a piece entitled Obama’s Science Fictions, Michael Specter hints that this is just what has happened: the administration is losing the public’s trust. In the piece, Specter contrasts Obama’s previous statements pledging to bring science back to the center of the Executive Branch's decisions with his conscious choice not to do just that in this instance. He concludes by posing the question: “If you don’t accept the recommendations of your most able and well-trained scientists, if you reject research results that have been endorsed heavily by dispassionate experts, then where do you end up?”

Let me tell you where you end up: with a lot of upset people. The Vice President of the National Organization for Women, Erin Matson, expressed discontent, interpreting Obama’s statement supporting Sebleius as being overly paternalistic: “In saying that he thinks he knows what’s best for women … and then [he] goes on to trivialize emergency contraceptives.”

Andrea Grimes, a blogger who writes about “sex, gender and feminism in Texas,” delineated how she is disappointed and downright crushed by how the Obama Administration has handled making Plan B available to young women. She expresses her frustration with Sebleius’s decision to overrule the FDA’s decision and her anger with Obama supporting that decision – pledging to remove her Obama/Change sticker from her car.

Hether Corinna was filled with hope when the FDA finally got on board with making Plan B available to women 16 and younger w/out a prescription. This hope was lost with Sebelius’ decision and the Obama Administration’s support. Corinna is now encouraging young people and women to speak out and express their disconnect

What I find interesting is that Hilary Clinton has been a long-time activist of making Plan B available to women of childbearing age, but she remains silent on Sebelius’ decision and Obama’s support. Susan Wood, who was the top official of the FDA, lauded Clinton’s activism and her work with two other Senators in who were "champions for science driving FDA-decision making." Clinton played an active role in securing access of Plan B without a prescription for women. In 2005, Clinton stated that she believed Plan B should be made widely available to women. A Clinton spokesperson did not return a request for comment. I am curious to know if her trust in the Administration is equally as wounded as everyone else’s’.

Stranger sexual harassment part 2

In October, I went to the National Lawyers Guild Annual Convention in Philadelphia. I traveled by plane with several fellow female law students, and after we arrived, one of them told the rest of us about her experience on the flight to Philly.

To give some background, this woman is a passionate advocate of women's rights (among others), and I consider her to be someone who is sure of herself and her values. She stands up for herself and holds several leadership positions at King Hall.

She had a window seat on the plane. A man, maybe in his late-twenties to mid-thirties, occupied the seat next to her. When he sat down, he made some small talk, took up both armrests as most men tend to do (the topic of men thinking they are entitled to space over women is for another day), and she put on her headphones when the small talk ended. The conversation did not consist of any talk of a sexual nature, nor did she make any indication that she was interested in him. Shortly thereafter, she felt something on her leg. She looked down to see that the man had placed one of his fingers on the side of her thigh that was closest to him. She said nothing. He then placed more fingers on her thigh to the point where, eventually, his entire hand was resting on her leg. She said nothing. He then proceeded to move his hand up her leg toward her crotch, and right before he got there, she shifted her weight and crossed one leg over the other, forcing him to remove his hand.

After she told us this, my first response was, "well, did you punch him in the face?" She said that she didn't say or do anything. She said that she was absolutely terrified and shocked that it was happening and simply froze. She didn't know what to do, and she didn't feel comfortable confronting him despite the fact that his touching was completely unwanted. Her mind was screaming with things to say, but she couldn't make them come out of her mouth. I was shocked. I thought to myself, if I was in that situation, the moment that man's finger touched my leg, I would have blurted out, "why the fuck are you touching me? Get your hands off of me!" I was absolutely flabbergasted that this intelligent, strong, feminist woman sat there in silence while a stranger groped her.

Another female fellow law student responded by telling us about her experience on BART not that long ago. It was fairly late at night, she was riding home on BART with a female friend, and an Oakland Raiders game had just ended. Two drunk, middle-aged men who had just left the game sat across from her on the train. They immediately hit on her and her friend, talked about their bodies and appearances, asked them very detailed and inappropriate questions about their sex lives, and made gestures and comments regarding specifically how they would have sex with them. She and her friend mostly blew them off or ignored them, but when they started talking about how they had daughters that were her age, she asked them how they'd like it if older men talked to their daughters the way they were talking to her, to which they replied, "whatever. I don't care." When she continued to be non-responsive to their harassment, they called her a dyke, saying, "what, you don't like the cock?" They then tried to talk her and her friend to giving them a "lesbo show." They endured the harassment until they got off the train. She said that she felt intimidated, especially because there were two older men who were drunk and very verbally aggressive.

Again, I was floored by the fact that both of these strong, pro-feminism women just sat there and allowed strangers to sexually harass them. I wonder if, in light of the research done by Fairchild and Rudman, these experiences contributed to either of these women feeling self-objectified.

After I heard the stories, I imagined how I would have reacted if I were in those situations. My impulsive response was that I would be very confrontational and make it clear that their behavior was not acceptable. But would I? I thought back on the times that I've been sexually harassed by a stranger, which thankfully has mostly been verbal harassment. I ignore it and I try to avoid the harasser. I apply a theory that I learned while studying Psychology in undergrad which is used when children engage in attention-seeking behavior: extinction conditioning. I ignore the harassing behavior so that the person doing it learns that he doesn't get a response when he harasses; if ignoring the behavior happens all or most of the time, eventually he will learn that harassing doesn't result in getting attention or getting girls. I realize that in this situation, as the research suggests, ignoring the harassing actually has the opposite effect.

In doing research for this blog, I came across some articles that reveal how countries have actually attempted to address the issue of stranger harassment. In India, women were getting groped and yelled at so frequently that the country created the "Ladies Special" - an all-female commuter train. Mexico City introduced women-only buses that are marked with pink placards. Japan has also experimented with female train cars.

But these are only surface-level fixes to a pervasive problem. Some have argued that it's sex discrimination itself - segregating men and women because men can't control themselves. In part 1 of this blog, I discussed how the research shows that there has been little attention paid to the problem of stranger harassment. In these countries, it seems as if attention is being paid to it, but not the right kind of attention. If the people who implemented these segregated transportation systems really want to fix the problem of stranger harassment, they're going to have to go deeper than pink buses and trains. They must address it at the legislative and judicial levels. Keeping men and women apart during transportation will only stall the harassment; holding men accountable and providing recourse for women who get harassed will curb it.

Stranger sexual harassment part 1

You're walking down the street when a car drives by and a man's voice yells, "ow-owwww!" You're in a crowded bar when you feel someone grab your ass. You turn around and have no idea who it was. You're on BART late at night after an Oakland Raiders game when two drunk Raiders fans twice your age start asking you about your sex life and begin discussing how they'd "pound you" if you went home with them. When you decline, they call you a dyke.

Part I will discuss the concept of stranger/street harassment and how it affects women. Part II will discuss anecdotal stories of real stranger harassment and how some countries have decided to deal with it.

Stranger sexual harassment, or "street harassment" is no new phenomenon. When women go out in public, they frequently experience men ogling, cat-calling, yelling sexual propositions, commenting on their bodies, groping them, and raping them. I have personally experienced nearly all of these, and many of my female friends have as well. While other forms of sexual harassment have been considered a problem large enough to garner the attention of the academic, legislative, and judicial communities (see the Civil Rights Act of 1964, landmark Supreme Court cases dealing with sex discrimination and sexual harassment), street harassment has been largely ignored.

Cynthia Grant Bowman's 1993 article in the Harvard Law Review describes stranger harassment as including

Both verbal and nonverbal behavior, such as wolf-whistles, leers, winks, grabs, pinches, catcalls, and stranger remarks; the remarks are frequently sexual in nature and comment evaluatively on a woman's physical appearance or on her presence in public.

She suggests that the ignorance of street harassment results from the fact that there is no legal recourse; a woman can't sue a stranger who gropes her and then disappears. She refers to Robin West's depiction of street harassment as a disempowering injury:

Women suffer unpunished and uncompensated sexual assaults continually...Although we have a trivializing phrase for these encounters - "street hassling" - these assaults are not at all trivial. They are frightening and threatening whispered messages of power and subjection...Yet, men who harass women on the street are not apprehended, they are not punished, the victims are not compensated, and no damages are paid. The entire transaction is entirely invisible to the state.

Furthermore, Deirdre Davis suggests in her article that street harassment is essentially sexual terrorism that intensifies the fear of rape and that the trivialization of it causes women not to talk about it, reinforcing its invisibility and effects. Street harassment has become so globally pervasive that women accept it as part of every-day life, even becoming complicit in it.

Kimberly Fairchild and Laurie Rudman's article states that, until 2008, the only attempt to document the differences between unwanted sexual attention from strangers and people known to the victim was done in 2000, using data collected from a national sample of Canadian women through the Violence Against Women Survey. It revealed that "stranger harassment is more prevalent than non-stranger harassment and that stranger harassment more strongly influences fear of victimization:" 85% of women reported experiencing stranger harassment while 51% reported experiencing non-stranger sexual harassment, and, "Stranger harassment reduces feelings of safety while walking alone at night, using public transportation, walking alone in a parking garage, and while home alone at night."

How do women respond to stranger harassment? Interestingly, and not surprising to me, Fairchild and Rudman explain that research suggests that most women are likely to respond passively and non-assertively to stranger harassment. Less than 20% of women use assertive or active coping strategies. Most commonly, women simply ignore harassment or attempt to avoid the harasser.

Fairchild and Rudman sought to expand the research on stranger harassment, and collected data from American female college students. They found relatively high prevalence rates of stranger harassment: 41% experienced stranger harassment at least once a month, 31% experienced it every few days or more. This included non-physical harassment such as catcalls, whistles, stares, sexist comments and "come-ons." More than a quarter experienced forceful grabbing at least once a month. They concluded that "stranger harassment turns public spaces into an everyday hostile environment for women."

The data also suggests that experiencing stranger harassment increases women's self-objectification. That is, they emphasize their body's appearance rather than its function and feel ashamed of a less than ideal body, which can lead to depression and eating disorders. Regarding how women reported coping with stranger harassment, it was revealed that women who responded actively by acknowledging that the behavior was inappropriate and either confronting or reporting the harasser were able to resist feeling sexually objectified. On the other hand, women who responded passively by ignoring or avoiding the harasser reported feeling self-objectified. Passive response was much more prevalent than active response.

It's a vicious cycle. A stranger sexually harasses a woman, increasing her fear of rape. Because of this fear, most women choose to avoid or ignore the harasser. Because there is no legal recourse in most situations, the woman knows she can't do anything about it because it is just part of every-day life. Because there are no consequences for the men that harass, and because most women don't confront them, men think it is acceptable behavior and continue to do it. What's a girl to do?

A Woman's Choice: Between Faith and Education, Between Faith and Testifying

Yesterday, the Canada Supreme Court heard arguments from both attorneys about whether a state's witness should be required to remove her niqab (a type of Muslim headdress, here) while testifying in court in a criminal trial. The case has once again placed Muslim headdress as the uneasy battleground between a woman's religious choice and society's professed need to limit that choice.

It takes me back to the same kinds of issues raised a month ago. Then, in our class presentation on Feminism and Religion, a few of my classmates and I presented the case of Leyla Sahin v. Turkey [A good discussion of it is here, at the ComparativeLawBlog]. A companion case in France, "L'affaire du foulard," or "The Headscarf Affair" --no, it is not a Norman Mailer novel-- occurred in 1989. Both dealt with the same issues of women's autonomy and choice, state paternalism, and Europe's often very loose relationship with the concept of free exercise. I find the whole issue fascinating.

Coming into that week, I already knew that in some cases what is purported to be a free expression of religion is in fact an instance of little choice, and that, in some more fundamentalist Muslim circles, the practice was and is enforced by so-called cultural police. To the extent that the enforcement involves violence against women, the practice is troubling on a criminal and moral level; to the extent that enforcement involves nonviolent coercion, it can still be unsettling. Enlightened observers often find it difficult to accept instances where women's (and not men's) freedom is cabined by society's and husbands' proscriptions of what they may and may not wear. My more liberal sentiments find that manipulation of women's public self particularly disturbing.

Yet I also recognize that that is but one part of the bigger picture. I now realize that Muslim headdresses are, for the most part, not just individual women's choices, they are in fact vital choices -- symbols of allegiance to God, and willing sacrifices of the self to that end. In fact, Muslim friends of mine have told me that only the most devout Islamic groups even require hijab as a part of their religious practice. These are the same kinds of signs of worship used by Jewish men who wear yarmulkes, or Catholics who confess. They are choices, and they are obligations. That a niqab, for example, so demonstrably covers a woman's face is to many a distinction without a real difference.

In that respect, then, the decision by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to uphold the Turkish school's ban on wearing hijab on campus was a powerful underestimation of the importance of a woman's peaceful religious expression. The ECHR majority opinion expressed its need to respect religious pluralism, which it said "has been dearly won over the centuries," yet was all too ready to dismiss that hard-fought principle because the Turkish state had deemed such expression disturbing to the public. I couldn't help but think of that series of free(ish) speech cases from the US in the first half of the twentieth century -- where the discussion and promotion of anti-war and pro-Communist teachings was a potential source of societal implosion. Decades later, during which freedom of expression and religion have found voice in countless national and international instruments, the ECHR used its majority opinion to give its imprimatur to the Turkish government's similar brand of fearful moralizing.

But I digress again. What I find as troubling as the Court's treatment of religion is the heavily paternalistic rhetoric advanced by those who support the Turkish and French bans on hijab in schools. Nicholas Sarkozy, for example, perhaps the best spokesman for France's brand of secularism, said in 2009, "We cannot accept to have in our society women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity... That is not the idea that the French Republic has of women's dignity. The burqa is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic." (as found in International Law: Norms, Actors, Processes, Dunoff, Ratner, Wippman, Eds.). This kind of thinking may be understandable to some, but it is an awfully shaky foundation for the creation of national legislation.

A similarly troubling element informs the Canadian court case mentioned at the start of this post. There, the defense attorney adamantly opposed a Muslim woman's (named N.S.) wish to wear her niqab while testifying against a cousin and uncle she accuses of sexual and physical abuse. In this case, the headdress is no less a religious symbol. Yet here the societal need is arguably much greater: the need for a fair trial for the defendants. There is a lot at stake for both sides, argued the defense attorney, and allowing N.S. to wear her niqab would rid the jury of the vital ability to use her facial expressions as a way to judge her credibility.

That may be so. Yet it also may have been overstated a bit. For one thing, the defense attorney surely knew that if N.S. would bve required to take off the niqab, she may refuse to testify, and the state would lose its key witness. There would likely be a dismissal or a mistrial, and I am sure that factor played a huge role in the attorney's urgency. Moreover, in stressing the importance of a witness' facial expressions, the defense attorney may have misrepresented the jury's concerns. He discounts the myriad other ways the jury could judge the witness' character, and presumes that a full facial view would have a tremendous impact.

Yet for all the defendants' concerns, it is N.S.'s concerns that would get short shrift if the court prohibits her from testifying in the niqab. First, it would put her in the impossible position between having to choose between testifying against her attackers, or defying her religious obligations. That is a horrible dilemma for the court to place her in. The chilling effect on the Muslim women community of Canada would be even worse. One can only imagine the drop in witness testimony by women afraid of the prospect of having to discard their very identities as women and as people of faith.

In the end, with this case, as with the European headdress cases, this all feels as if there are important decisions being made over women's matters. Yet the women in question aren't the decision-makers. They await word from the ECHR, or the Canada Supreme Court, to find out what limits will be placed on their right to publicly express their identities. What often gets lost in heated public debate about how things should be is adequate consideration of what women choose things to be. Hopefully, the Canada Supreme Court will recognize that a woman's choice between prosecuting her offenders and defying her religious self is no choice at all.

Just be nice...

When I sat down to write this final post on our Feminist Legal Theory Blog, I started to think about the themes that came up during class discussion and throughout our posts. We discussed the role that media, educational institutions, and gender norms play in the feminist movement. Another issue that came up in discussion, but perhaps was harder to write about, is women’s treatment of other women. My colleague, Hanestagless, touched upon the topic in a recent post. Many of the post commentators noted the prevalence of this problem. So, is there any truth to the notion that women are our own worst enemy?

You don’t have to go far to find studies and commentary about this topic. A paper recently released out of the University of Ottawa, titled, “Intolerance of Sexy Peers: Intrasexual Competition Among Women,” suggests that hostility towards female peers increases depending on how the peer is dressed. According to authors Tracy Vaillancourt and Aanchal Sharma, the less conservative females dress, the more their female peers judge and dislike them. The findings prompted Pasadena City College professor Hugo Schwyzer to write an article in response, titled, “Short Skirts Magically Turn Women Into Bitches.” (Note, although I found the Professor’s commentary interesting, I did not appreciate his using the term “bitches” to described female to female animosity). He concludes that his female students are more hostile towards each other in spring then in winter (when we wear more clothing).

Author Susan Tardanico, a regular contributor for to Forbes, recently published an article addressing what she refers to as “Relational Aggression.” In her piece, “The Psychological Warfare of Women: Are We Our Own Worst Enemy?” Tardanico explains that the same episodes of judging and criticizing amongst college women (as discussed in Schwyzer’s post) also occur amongst female executives. She uses the example of a female higher-up who, following her promotion, is essentially ostracized by her female co-workers. She questions why this happens so regularly and her answer is Relational Aggression, or as she puts it, “the single most damaging and often-used weapon in a woman’s arsenal.” I find it sad, but likely appropriate, that she deems this behavior a “weapon.” It’s likely appropriate because at the end of the day, it’s just that. Behavior that discourages female empowerment is destructive and counterproductive.

How does this destructive behavior play out in the real world? Tardanico points to an interesting study released in 2009, titled “Holding Women Back,” that researched the “glass-ceiling” within the female labor force. The study questioned what it was that is “holding women back.” The answer, as Tardanico reports it: “information about developmental opportunities is not shared (and therefore not known); recently-promoted women have little to no support when transitioning into a new role; and there is a startling lack of female advocates and mentors.” The suggestion being that opportunities aren’t shared, support is scarce and female advocates are lacking, because other women are holding back.

If this is true, it is something that we can change. Both men and women can take part…but especially women. Although it may take generations to make it “better,” it starts with a simple “just be nice.”