feminist leadership now

As many of my devoted readers may suspect, the precipitous decline in the volume of posts on rad to the max! is intimately related to the fact that I have been busy running for NOW Action Vice President on the Feminist Leadership NOW slate.

Please check out our campaign for more information: www.feministleaders.org. We also are on Facebook and Twitter.

Since many people have been asking what they can do to help, I suggest you:

1. Sign up for the NOW National Conference in Indianapolis where we’ll vote, and plan to attend. It takes place June 19-21 in Indianapolis. (Note: You must have a current NOW membership through at least March 15, 2009, to be eligible for a delegate slot.)

2. Submit a testimonial for me to FeministLeadershipNOW@gmail.com if you have worked with me in an activist or women’s rights capacity.

3. Go to our Web site and participate in our discussions, donate to the cause and get more information about the slate.

Thanks for your support!

a rant about certain minisites

Beyond awards and the time my boss bought lunch, one crowning moment stands in my interactive copywriting career thus far:

The time my partner and I presented minotaurs, cyclops and leprechauns as the way to sell a … B2B VoIP platform. It was a minisite integrated with a full advertising campaign for a major cable company. In the proposed minisite, you got to play on an elevator with a leprechaun while explaining complex P2P interactions made possible by the unification of computing and telephony. The tagline was: Communications Beyond Imagination.

In short, it was advertising masturbation. While this concept was really funny for us to create and flesh out, it had nothing to do with the product at hand. This is what happens a lot in interactive advertising agencies. You get pressured to create genuine ad-school quality creative in the form of a minisite because this is a more lucrative sell for the account people then, say, targeted main site content along with interactive tactics that reach potential consumers where they are on the Web – which is Google, where we get direct answers to honest plain questions.

While there is a place for amazing, creative interactive advertising (hint: it has to fit the product and needs of the consumer), I’m sick of smart interactives buying into the motion-graphics lie that every campaign must fly to the moon. Today I was surfing the 2009 Webby Award Winners and discovered that what I had considered the most boorish, annoying minisite of the past year was named the winner of the Insurance category.

Go to www.letyourworriesgo.com and see for yourself. Do you want to drag an actress dressed in a college graduation uniform into a rocket ship and blast her into outer space when you are considering whether to buy life insurance? Where is the information on this site? Upon completing the task, which is granted, extremely conceptual and well-executed visually, you get a stupid form to have a sales person contact you for more information. That’s it. No information about life insurance, no answers to questions the target consumer might be asking and no anticipated answers to additional questions the target consumer hasn’t yet thought to ask. There are absolutely no details about the product.

Don’t get me wrong, I would have had a great time concepting that minisite over a foosball table at 2 a.m. some Tuesday night, and an even more fun time putting it together. But, as advertising creatives we’ve got to be honest. Sometimes spot-on information is more appropriate.

women and the workforce

I attended the Minnesota NOW State Conference yesterday, where Dr. Jennifer Keil, Associate Professor of Management and Economics at Hamline University School of Business, and Patty Tanji, President of the Pay Equity Coalition of Minnesota gave a fabulous presentation on the status of women in our workforce.

Today, women earn 45 percent of all household income, and 8 million families rely solely on a woman’s income. It has been projected that women may soon outnumber men in the paid labor force due to continuing layoffs in male-dominated professions, such as construction and financial services.

We spoke at length about how women engaged in paid labor earn, on average, 79.3 percent of what men earn. Why, after more than 35 years with pay equity laws on the books, is this still happening?

One issue is job segregation. Only 38 percent of management positions are held by women, with most women clustered into low-wage occupations including admistrative/secretarial work, teaching, nursing, customer service, bookkeeping and child care. If we are to close the gap, we must start not only educating more women in science, math, technology, engineering, business and other male-dominated professions, we also must start to institute “comparable worth” of positions, acknowledging that many of the underpaid positions held by women are actually highly skilled and deserving of a more equal pay grade.

Another issue is salary negotiation. Dr. Keil explained how women in her undergraduate courses expect to make exactly as much as men expect to make during their first position after college, but that women expect to make $20,000 less than men expect five years after college, and $45,000 less 10 years after college. Not only do women expect less, many also believe they don’t know how to ask for more money; leading to a vicious circle continuing to support the economic dominance of men over women in our society, even among the highly qualified.

The most interesting issue for a radical feminist like me is the “opt-out revolution.” It has been suggested by Linda Hirshman, author of Get to Work, that feminism has failed on account of the large numbers of women who enter highly paid professions and leave to start their own businesses, work part-time from home or take care of their families instead.

Many women of Hirshman’s ilk bash women who choose to opt out of the corporate world, while many others fight for greater inclusion of women who are attempting to reenter the paid workforce following time spent caregiving within the home. The first perspective is useless and offensive – it’s not feminist to blame women for attempting to survive in a larger system that doesn’t support their full empowerment. Progress to come from the latter perspective is truly helpful – to the women who need more accommodating paths within their careers; to the businesses who will continue to miss more opportunities for the best-educated talent in a world where women now outnumber men in the accomplishment of undergraduate and graduate degrees; and to the society that requires accommodate of caregiving and paid labor force participation at once – regardless of gender.

These are all liberal feminist perspectives, scary to some, but fine and good for many. Let’s get a little more radical.

We live in a failed economic system that, for all the dialogue about Wall Street and regulation, says desperately little about its forceful subjugation of women. Many women would disagree; “It’s my choice,” they’ll say. These women shouldn’t be blamed, but the reality of the situation is that they are expected to take on caregiving responsibilities in ways men are not. Even if a woman is not going to engage in caregiving during her lifetime, it is assumed she will and many employers will discriminate against her for pay and promotion on the presumption that she might leave someday – based solely on her gender.

Women are laden with the majority of caregiving responsibilities and society doesn’t back them up. It’s time for society to back them the fuck up.

Women receive Social Security for time spent working in the paid labor force, but receive absolutely nothing during years spent caregiving – the time when they are providing the most service to the state. Without the work of women caregivers, society would fall apart. Social services would take on even more fiscal responsibility; early childhood education centers would be jammed; Medicare and Medicaid would be flooded with requests for additional assistance to the elderly.

What’s more, women live longer than men and have less in their retirement accounts and Social Security due to wage inequity, workforce segregation and time spent outside of the paid labor force to engage in caregiving. It’s no surprise the overwhelming majority of elderly women live in poverty.

Caregiving is work and should be considered part of the paid labor force. A true government of the people must immediately recognize time spent caregiving and compensate it fairly with Social Security.

facebook messin’ with our thoughts

Dear Facebook,

I’ve noticed that I spend less time on Facebook since you’ve changed the layout. I know I’m not the only one.

Web experts complain about the new design and user experience flows. Simple people know the problem is more simple. The problem is that you didn’t consult us. You led us to believe that your site was all about us, our thoughts, our friends, our games, our calendars and more. We had internalized your mechanisms to the point that they became ours – and we counted on our social lives working the way we thought they should.

You can’t change the way we think, not autocratically.

What you should have done was tested new features, allowed us time to switch between the new and the old Facebook, and solicited our feedback. Then you should have let us take the features we wanted and ignore those we didn’t. Don’t do this again.

Love,
A Girl Who Sits Online All Day (Just No Longer On Your Site)

give us a commission on women

Recently, President Obama established a White House Council on Women with the aim of coordinating the various efforts to advance women inside existing government agencies. Obama hired longtime friend and women’s rights ally Valerie Jarrett to oversee the Council. As she has noted in interviews with the press, the role of this new group is vital as nobody has ever bothered to assess what the extensive arms of the federal government are doing for women, and chances are there is overlap and efficiencies could be sought. Sure; very well; fine and good; but an important fact remains: Women are not a business.

Women are not equal.

Shockingly, disturbingly not equal.

Therefore, what is needed is an additional body, one that hasn’t been in place since President Clinton held the podium: a Presidential Commission on Women. The role of the Commission would be to eliminate sexism by assessing what needs to be done to ensure women’s equality in America, suggesting new policies to the administration and sponsoring initiatives to realize the dream. This body could certainly complement the Council, which I am by no means suggesting should go away.

But as a feminist of conscience I don’t feel that President Obama is living up to the high bar created when he won the presidency and Hillary lost (being honest, that was the real contest; McCain’s campaign was over the moment George W. Bush’s failed economic policies started snatching everyone’s homes and jobs). Point the finger at the media or anyone you like, but the fact remains that Hillary Clinton was forced to bow out of the race while she still led the popular vote; and not only would she have been the first woman president, she would have been the first strong feminist president. This has been known about her for quite some time; the public not only became accustomed to the idea of supporting a president from such a background, they voted for her in droves.

Obama is a good man and we can be glad he pays attention to the feminist movement. What’s needed, however, is more top-level intervention from the administration to supplement the meta-level coordination already occuring within the Council.

Please add your name to this petition to call for the reestablishment of the Presidential Commission on Women.

all behold the red pen

I know what it’s like to cry in a barren computer lab on a Friday night. Apple IIes don’t forgive; they glare at you in pixelated green, letting you know that your journalism adviser thinks you, the newest cub reporter for the newspaper of record, (yes) YOU are a total pile of shit who can’t write the definite article without making your mother rethink her decision to carry you to term.

I wept as I rewrote my first story, or shall I say typed the new story she wrote. And I learned how to write better.

Everyone said I was a good writer so I decided to try my hand professionally after college. It seemed like the right thing to do; nobody had knocked on my door with a “hey, you have a women’s studies degree and we’re ready for you to save the world” job offer.

Quickly my thick skin turned into a carapace; I basically morph into an arthropod the moment a situation turns professional. My fingers navigate a keyboard like crawdad claws in grit and sand (okay, that’s just because I consume most meals over the computer) and every piece of writing-related feedback bounces right off me. I tell new colleagues: “I have no feelings. Just tell me what you think.”

I have an appreciation for those who edit the shit out of me. Some of my most difficult editors turned me into a significantly better writer. As is not uncommon in my line of work, I switch sides on a fairly frequent basis, editing others’ work. With my red pen twirling occasionally in the air, sometimes I remember the green glow illuminating my sorrowful face years ago. The combination of colors lends a devilishly wonderful Grinchy glow.

need new rage over the g-20 summit

As the boots stomped in London, world leaders tried to figure out how they could invent money with the snap of a finger, and Michelle Obama wore (OMG, amazing) clothes worthy of at least 25 percent of American press coverage …

Men decided the fate of the so-called economic crisis, the playground of men in suits swapping complex terminology and make-believe cash values with increasingly disastrous outcomes, and the fate of women, the world’s most impoverished, was not mentioned.

the other one in the kitchen: a poem for sylvia plath

Every sixth night I washed their dishes,
Caked or flecked with squandered vitality.
Burps, farts, pees and shits made laughs.
Behind the open carved doorknob
Rain-soaked skyscrapers waited for me.
We dreamed how we were perfect, and we were.

Above faded, white plastic floor, my ankles
Stood thickened, blushing for your nylons.
Two of us in a place meant for ten more –
Their songs exploded into a full choir,
Sonorous but twisting with subtlety:
And all those rising scales and steps
Mirrored the other one in the kitchen.

Hands scrubbing silently, shapes not hers
Moving faithfully for that blindest faith
Her cataracts pixilated like shadows:
He lifts his arm to bring her close, but she
Shies from his touch: his is an iron mood.
Seeing her grieve, he turns his face away.
They poise and grieve as in some old tragedy.

Caked in mud but reflecting lavender, he and she
Reached in the direction of the nozzle. Our examples
Of equality would have pleased everyone looking for them.
The skyline burst into a general construction project.
Weekly landscapes turned into nightly palettes.
We left them stacked haphazardly to dry.
Lights out, they dogged us, sleepless, envious:

We dreamed their arguments, their stricken voices.
We might embrace, but that one never reached,
Come, so unlike us, to such a stiff impasse,
Burdened in such a way she seemed the lighter
Herself the mastermind, and they, flesh and blood;
As if, above love’s ruinage, they were
The heaven that one dreamed of, in despair.

(This poem borrows heavily from Sylvia Plath’s The Other Two, and has been written in honor of the death of her son, and the poetry teacher who told me my work reminds her of Sylvia Plath – who I guess I will honor as foremother.)

the perils of writing honestly

I believe in hidden dimensions. Recently, a book about superstring theory exposed me to theoretical Calabi-Yau shapes. They have six dimensions we haven’t discovered yet. The shapes themselves I cannot understand, but of particular fascination to me is the way in which large portions of the theoretical physics community take and perform mental tests on the properties of these shapes. It is like life.

People think differently than we do, in dimensions unbeknown to us, and layer complex intellectual and emotional extensions of those thoughts in extremely detailed manners, laying theory upon theory upon practice, in ways that have the power to blow our minds as strongly as Calabi-Yau shapes do mine.

This is why each instance of honest writing is a radical act.

Exposing new, unspoken or theoretically incomprehensible dimensions to others, even ourselves, does not make for comfortable dinner conversation. It certainly won’t make the writer popular. Read, perhaps, but not popular.

I made a strategic decision years ago not to filter my personal writing. In my case, I believe one of my primary purposes in life is to expose uncomfortable truths. I’m not necessarily saying I’ve achieved that, yet, but I know what I’m driving toward. Just last night I dreamed that I was merging onto the right side of the freeway, and all the signs were clearly in my direction – but there were cars driving the wrong direction. The drivers were afraid to see the signs. I wanted to speak up and let everyone know that it would be easier to get where they wanted to go if they allowed themselves to read the signs.

Probably these kinds of people will never read my work, or if they do they will criticize it openly or use it against me someday, but there is nothing wrong with putting the world as you see it down on paper so long as its not slanderous, libellous or discriminatory against innocence.

the priest

The moisture in his eyes may have given the wife comfort. The man was another story. A dying man craves an expression of serenity, authority, but the Priest had to sneeze. He held out; the man did not; he left the hospital to prepare for the wedding that evening.

He had met with Susan and Robert six times. They were not from the parish; her mother had insisted upon a good Catholic wedding. Their children, they agreed, would be raised within the faith. The Priest doubted them. He suspected they had been lying about everything — their innocence most.

Susan floated down the aisle, mist coating her cheeks like a dashboard in the morning. She had spent the entire day constructing herself into a woman worthy of photographs. The Priest realized she had been more beautiful during the counseling sessions. He looked down, noticing Robert’s knotted fingers. He appeared stressed.

Robert was stressed. He no longer loved Susan. His love had yielded to obligation. Susan had demanded he marry her. Three winters masquerading as spring, summer and fall had passed before he agreed. He had proposed like this: “Will you marry me?” They had been stalled in traffic. She squeezed his hand as he shifted into second gear, his foot straining to release the clutch.

Susan’s mother appeared happy. She was wearing a rose-colored dress. It shimmied in the light. The Priest began the ceremony. He said the right things. He had chosen service to consume himself with questions of why rather than the mechanics of how, but life had not indulged him. Priests were operations managers of the established social order, he decided, continuing to blather through the ceremony until Robert spoke at the wrong time.

“I believe I can’t do this.” The guests looked down, all but Susan’s mother, who seared her eyes to Susan’s back.

That night, the Priest kissed a woman for the first time. Robert had been right; her value depreciated instantly.