I should really stop reading the Globe and Mail...

...It always manages to make me mad, almost without fail. Here is today's infuriating piece:

Chivalry isn’t dead, a study has found. But according to the researchers, gallantry has become a front for "benevolent sexism."

Everyday acts that imply that women should be cherished and protected are a form of patriarchal control, they argue.

See, this is something I agree with, although I really wish it wasn't said in such a condescending way.

And also, gallantry hasn't "become a front" for anything. Chivalry has ALWAYS been based in patriarchal power.

Based on the report, published in Psychology of Women Quarterly, enlightened men should avoid the following:

1. Offering to help a woman carry shopping bags (implies she’s weak)
   
   
2. Insisting on driving her home (implies she can’t look after her own safety)
   
   
3. Assuming she wants help buying a laptop (implies she’s clueless with technology)
   
   
4. Complimenting a woman on her cooking (reinforces the idea that cooking is a woman’s job)

Okay, so I disagree with the last one, because when somebody has perfected a skill, or when someone does something for you, that should always be appreciated. Assuming that all women are good cooks is sexist, not complimenting an individual woman on her talent.

Insidious deeds like these are being overlooked by women as well as men, psychologists Julia C. Becker and Janet K. Swim report in the study.

To correct matters, women need to "see the unseen," the researchers note, while men need to be aware of their sexist behaviour and also feel empathy for the women targeted.

"Insidious deeds"? Now you're just making fun of this, Globe and Mail. At any rate, the problem is not so much with the actions themselves as with the assumptions behind them. If a person drives another person home for whatever reason--it's raining out, they live far away, they've had too much to drink, there's rioting in the streets, etc.--that is good. The problem is the assumption that women can't take care of themselves. Same with the laptop buying. Helping someone choose a laptop if they ask for your help is a good deed! Helping someone when they don't want/need your help is rude! Assuming that women need your help because they're women is sexist!

The question is, should men be on the lookout for benevolent sexism too? Based on our observations, women may be guilty of the following:

1. Expecting a man to take out the garbage (implies it’s a man’s job)
   
   
2. Leaving car maintenance, such as oil changes, for a man to do (see above)
   
   
3. Ridiculing how a man dresses a child (implies a woman’s colour coordination is superior)
   
   
4. Judging a man for being "cheap" when he wants to share the dinner bill (reinforces the idea that men should be earners)

The lists of offences cancel each other out, don’t they?

See, this is the problem with the patriarchy. It makes unfair assumptions about people of ALL genders. And feminism is about getting rid of that. Nobody ever argued that women can't be female chauvinist pigs. In fact, the reason the patriarchy is still around is that so many people buy into it, including women! Because, feminists? Yeah, they don't do the things on that list--well, maybe sometimes, but they recognize that as sexist behaviour rooted in a patriarchal social dynamic and try to avoid it as much as possible. The women who wrote that report would agree with the Globe and Mail that the patriarchal assumptions about men as well as those about women need to end.

For goodness sake, Globe and Mail! FEMINISM IS NOT PERSONALLY ATTACKING YOU. FEMINISM IS NOT ATTACKING MEN. FEMINISM IS JUST SAYING, "HEY PEEPS, THESE THINGS THAT PEOPLE DO, WE SHOULD PROBS STOP DOING THEM IN THE INTERESTS OF EQUALITY, BECAUSE THEY'RE ALL PATRIARCHAL AND SHIT."

As for the crusade against sexism, Sunday Telegraph columnist Jenny McCartney argues that feminists have bigger fish to fry (at least, they would if a woman’s place was in the kitchen).

Examples include female circumcision, child marriage, human trafficking, rape as a weapon of war and the proliferation of extreme sexual violence in films and on the Internet, she writes.

"I am inclined to think that when one finds a man who believes that women should be cherished and protected, it would be a good idea to send him forth to encourage the others."

Ooh, nice back-handed sexist joke there, Globe and Mail. You're not bitter and defensive at all about this subject matter.

And seriously??? Who the frack is this woman???? Has she ever been "cherished and protected"? Because I have and it SUCKS. I am an adult, not a child, not a porcelain doll. Please don't put me on a shelf behind a glass case because I will suffocate and DIE. To quote from an angry letter sent to an ex-boyfriend who was stalking me a few years ago, "You treated me alternately as precious china and as a property of yours (both equally annoying, worse when combined)."

Because that's the other problem here, that the kind of guy who treats women like precious china is also probably the kind of guy who treats them like property--another patriarchal sentiment. And a guy who thinks of his girlfriend as his property is likely to have trouble letting her go if she dumps his sorry, misogynistic ass.

And, you know? Neither china nor personal property is usually sentient. As I wrote my ex in that same angry letter, "I got the impression that you only cared about my feelings inasmuch as they affected my opinion of you, my behaviour towards you, or my actions." And, "I've probably heard more about your feelings since we broke up than when we were together. Selfishly, you haven't listened to mine much at all."

So, yeah. Doing things with underlying patriarchal assumptions is a problem. But the actions themselves are not the problem. The underlying patriarchal assumptions are the problem. As feminists have been trying to tell people for decades, patriarchy hurts men too. Now if only the Globe and Mail would realize that feminism is trying to fix this.

You may not have realized this, but I am actually not an ice cream cone

This post originally appeared here:

http://voteagainstapathy.blogspot.com/2011/05/you-may-not-have-realized-this-but-i-am.html

So there was this thing called "election-themed flavour of the week," and was like, "Oh, I wonder what that is? Perhaps a selection of the most popular stories of the week!" My Awesome Housemate was like, "The flavour of the week should be orange crush!" And then we clicked on it and it is neither of those things. Instead it's a collection of pictures of attractive female candidates. Can I be appalled? The "sexiest election candidate" was one thing, because it was equal-opportunity and also you knew what you were getting into when you clicked on the link. And this one also has little blurbs underneath the pictures that half the time sounds like a personals ad… you know, "enjoys mountain biking with that special someone!" SO disgusted right now. Women are not ice cream cones. "Flavour" of the week, pah.

Women, the Vote, and Raising One's Voice

This post originally appeared here:

http://voteagainstapathy.blogspot.com/2011/04/women-vote-and-raising-ones-voice.html

Equal Voice, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to getting more women elected to all levels of government, has a new initiative called the iCommit Campaign, basically asking young women to commit to voting in the election, and staying engaged in politics beyond. If you're a woman between the ages of 18 and 24, you should go do just that.

I've already displayed the graphic that shows voting intentions by age. Here's another one, voting intentions by gender:

This isn't as drastic as the youth vs. senior because it cuts across all age groups, but there is still an important difference. And if you, like me, are both young and a woman, well, you've probably noticed that the composition of Parliament mostly reflects the votes of older men (who also make up most of the composition of Parliament). That's why it's important, not only to vote, but to be politically engaged. We do need more women in Parliament. We don't have nearly enough women running for election let alone winning. As Jack Layton points out, it's a historic first that even 40% of NDP candidates in this election are women.

All this has made me reflect on the history of women's votes. Well, no, actually that's a lie. I was already reflecting on the history of women's votes because I wrote a paper about it two weeks ago so it's all fresh in my mind. (I'm a nerd, so sue me.)

You may not know this, but up until the 1840s it was common practice for women in Montreal to vote. When we think about the history of women voting, we usually think of the suffragettes. But I kind of like these earlier women who weren't necessarily fighting for anything, who just went out and voted like it was no big deal.

The thing you have to understand is that before democracy became the big new thing in the late 1700s/early 1800s, position in the social hierarchy was a much better indicator of your power than gender. Anyone who's seen The Tudors or Marie Antoinette will know that women in court had a lot of power. And poor women were just as likely to riot in the streets as their male counterparts.

In order to be eligible to vote in most parts of the British Empire, you had to be a subject of the King/Queen, over the age of majority, and hold a certain amount of property in your name (this was to keep the voting to the more prosperous members of society, rather than the rabblerousers on the street). Traditionally, property was held by men, who passed it down to their oldest son. In the absence of sons, a daughter might inherit some property in the richest of families (think Anne de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice), but not in families that were less well-off (think Mr. Collins and the Bennett sisters). Whoever did inherit would be expected to care for the widow (think Mrs. Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility). So women rarely held enough property to be eligible to vote, although they were not banned from doing so should they meet the requirements.

Quebec, however, maintained French Civil Law even under the British Empire. Under Quebec laws, property was jointly held by married couples, although the husband, as executor, was essentially considered to own the property. However, this meant that upon a man's death half of the marital property belonged to the widow, and the other half was generally split among all children who were of age. This meant that many widows of voters, especially those whose children were under the age of majority, were eligible to vote. It also meant that more daughters inherited property. And the "separation of goods"--a marital contract that stopped property from being held jointly by keeping it in the name of the person who brought it into the marriage--was common for upper middle class families like the Molsons (beer) and the Redpaths (sugar).

So in many parts of Quebec, and particularly Montreal, women were in the habit of voting. This was sometimes controversial, since polls were much more violent places in the early nineteenth century than they are now. And some people were afraid that married women who voted were being dragged to the polls by their husbands in order to provide an extra vote for the husband's chosen candidate. But all in all, women voters were accepted, especially the widows.

And then equality happened. The thing with equality is that it was all men who were born equal, not all people. It was liberté, égalité, fraternité. Women were kind of squeezed out of the political arena, firstly because most women who had power were aristocrats, and also because women were associated more and more with the private sphere: motherhood, domesticity, and being a good little wife. (Think the Victorian era, or maybe the 1950s.)

All of a sudden the idea of a poor little wife and mother being pushed onto the hustings and forced to say, "My name is x, I am a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, I have property worth x amount on x street, and I would like to vote for candidate x," in front of a jeering crowd of thugs, was unthinkable. (Yes, this was how people voted back in the day). Any woman who would do that willingly was clearly of questionable morality, and DUDE GUYS WE NEED TO SAVE THE WIMMENZ WHO ARE BEING FORCED TO PARTICIPATE IN DEMOCRACY!!!!! There was also a thing where they were afraid that if women could vote, women would try to run for seats, and then they would be pregnant all the time and never able to show up to Parliament, but that's just so ridiculous I'm not even going to try to unpack it.

In the Election Act passed in the Province of Canada (ie Ontario and Quebec) in 1849, buried in 30 pages of minutiae on determining county boundary lines and the legitimacy of returning officers, is this line:

Article 46: "And be it declared and enacted, That no woman is or shall be entitled to vote at any such election, whether for any County or Riding, City or Town."

Just one sentence! Just one sentence that in a stroke strips thousands of people of their voting privileges!

And it was such a non-issue that I haven't even been able to find a reference to it in any of the newspapers of the time.

So that's why I think it's important for women to vote. Because our government and our parliament were built in a time when people had that mindset. Most of the Fathers of Confederation were already in politics by the time that bill went through. Sir John A. Macdonald voted on it, probably without thinking about Article 46 because I'm pretty sure that's the shortest article in the entire Act. The only reason women got to vote again in the first place was a political ploy by Sir Robert Borden during the First World War, when he allowed the wives and mothers of soldiers to vote, knowing they would most likely vote for him and keep him in power.

Don't you think we should be reasserting our rights, reinserting our voices? I understand that a system created when the idea of women voting was counterintuitive, doesn't really speak to women. But that's exactly WHY we need to speak up for ourselves, why we need to get in there and MAKE things more accessible for women.

Because the old men that run our country right now? They sure ain't gonna do it.

I'm back, look at me talk about immigration

You may have noticed that I have been absent for some time (then again, you may not have noticed this at all). This was for several reasons:

1) I was busy
2) I was bored
3) I was blogging about the election over here.

Blogging about the election (and the fact that people actually read my blog! 1500 hits over the course of the election!) I think really improved my blogging skills because I HAD to blog anytime something interesting and new happened. 100 posts over the course of the election—that is A LOT.

Anyway, so I’m back. And I think the blog will be going through a bit of a redesign. Also I may actually blog lots now that I have a job where I can spend mornings taking copious breaks to read the news while waiting for people to ask me questions.

So here is the game plan: reblog some of my favourite posts from my election blog, and write lots of awesome posts from here on out!

Let’s start now. Okay. So I read this morning that accepting 100 000 more immigrants a year may or may not help Canada. Actually the entire article seemed quite ambivalent on the issue:

Canada already takes more immigrants per capita than any other nation.
But these analysts want Canadians to think about welcoming 350,000 newcomers a year, instead of the current 250,000.

They say immigration policy is a potential “tinderbox” which could turn into a Canadian cultural “inferno” if the numbers on it turn bad — for either native-born or newcomers.

We only take 250 000 immigrants a year and that’s more immigrants per capita than any other nation? Pah. Pah, I say. You know what was a good year for immigration? 1913, Canada’s all-time immigration high. In that year, Canada accepted over 400 000 into a population of less than eight million. Yeah. And the sky didn’t fall, and there were no infernos whatsoever.

On to what the economists have to say:

Although their “shock” scenario of 100,000 more immigrants is controversial, York University’s Tony Fang and the University of Toronto’s Peter Dungan and Morley Gunderson generally say immigration is an economic positive.
Indeed, the economists go further than most politicians.

Their news release boldly states 100,000 more immigrants per year would boost the gross domestic product and add to government coffers by stimulating buying and especially pumping up housing prices.

However, the body of the 34-page report — titled The Macroeconomic Impacts of Canadian Immigration: An Empirical Analysis Using The Focus Model — is less confident than the news release.

The scholars quietly admit in their paper that many of the hundreds of immigration studies they analyzed from around the world reached “mixed” conclusions on many fronts.

For instance, the report tentatively concludes that immigrants generally don’t use taxpayer-funded social and health services more than “domestic-born” residents.
However, the authors concede immigrants, especially more recent ones, may more greatly rely on unemployment insurance the longer they are here.

And even though the news release makes it seem 100,000 more immigrants would benefit Canadian total GDP, the body of the analysis quietly acknowledges per capita GDP could slightly shrink.

Just as importantly, the authors acknowledge many new immigrants are feeling battered. More recent arrivals are having a “difficult time economically assimilating” and are “increasingly falling into poverty.”

I had a Canadian Studies prof who used to say that every immigrant to Canada created three jobs, but he was also a pro-multiculturalism Marxist former hippie, so. Take from that what you will.

Those 1913 immigrants were as poor as church mice (or poorer), often living in tenement houses with all 13 children sleeping in the same bed. Of course, back then Canadians thought that their houses were quite unclean, which meant, obviously, that they were morally bankrupt and therefore undeserving of charity. But still.

I went to a high school with a very large population of New Canadians. So large, in fact, that we didn’t really think of them as New Canadians, or immigrants, or what have you. We were all people who were in the same classes and we had all been born in different places. I could write a math test next to a girl born in Somalia, do a drama presentation with a guy born in Iran, have a locker in the middle of a chatty group of Koreans, and chat on the bus home with friends born in China. (The Koreans were always known as Koreans because they had mostly only been in Canada for a few years and always talked to each other in Korean. Most of the other kids weren’t actually known as a group by nationality, unless you count the catch-all term “Asians.”

One thing I learned in high school, having classmates and friends who had left another country to come here, is that they all had super-impressive parents. Well, you kind of have to be impressive to meet the immigration standards. The people I went to school with had parents who had been heart surgeons, lawyers, academics. And then they came to Canada and discovered that, for the most part, even their high school diplomas didn’t count here.

Can you imagine how frustrating it must be? To come from a profession you enjoy, one that gives you prestige and a certain standard of living, and then be told that you have to do all of your education over again? And you can’t afford that, you spent all your savings getting your family to your new country—you can’t afford to go back to school, you have to work. You sacrificed everything to get your family out of your dangerous homeland, God damn it, and you’re going to give your kids a decent standard of life if it kills you.

Many of my friends’ parents owned and operated restaurants (often either shawarma places or fast food franchises). It was something they’d had to work up to, at the beginning, but at least it was something that was more interesting and challenging than driving and taxi, and didn’t require years and years more formal education to get a little slip of paper saying “you are qualified for x.”

So where am I going with all this? I’m not entirely sure since I seem to have lost track of my initial point.

Ah. No. Got it. We’re good.

Maybe instead of seeing New Canadians on unemployment as a disincentive to high immigration rates, we should see it as a fundamental problem with the way we integrate these New Canadians into our society.

When Your Guy Friends Say "I Hate Feminists"

I started to write about this, decided I would introduce the topic by giving an overview of the Insecure Nerd Boy, and then got distracted and ended up ranting. Sorry.

So: the point I was trying to make is that most of my friends are Insecure Nerd Boys, an identity that has a little bit of misogyny built in (on of the Insecure Nerd Boy's main points of definition is that he lusted after the unattainable hot cool girl in high school, couldn't get her, and now believes himself too uncool to get a girlfriend, even one who is just as nerdy as him. And also, although I didn't mention this in the previous post, Insecure Nerd Boys tend to comment negatively on the attractiveness of Nerd Girls even though they are hardly more attractive themselves).

How, I have a very analytical mind. I'm constantly assessing and deconstructing what's going on around me, and one of the main lenses I use is gender. So I'm pretty much always conscious of the workings of the patriarchy around me. That doesn't mean I always talk about it. It's just so intrinsic that I only mention things that really bother me.

This means that it is somehow possible for some of my friends (especially the Insecure Nerd Boys, who have difficulty recognizing and identifying emotions and opinions not explicitly stated) to not realize that I am a feminist.

In turn, this leads to awkward situations where someone goes, "God, I hate feminists."

I try not to be personally offended when one of my male friends says this. Instead of putting on my hardcore-feminist-cloak-of-anger, I usually say, calmly and reasonably, "Why do you hate feminists?"

This often surprises the dude in question. He thought his statement was self-evident. Often he will stumble through some response which you can neatly tear down ("Feminists are just whiny lesbians") or handily win a debate over ("Feminists want chivalry AND equality, that's just not fair").

Because these dudes are intelligent, generally well-read and somewhat politically aware beings, they don't usually engage in mindless feminist-hate. In fact some of them will have specific, if stupid, reasons for hating feminists. For example: "The sexual assault hotline is an all-female space, there's no place for male victims to turn. Also the women who run it are crazy misandrists." This is actually true in the city where I live. The local sexual assault hotline is run by a bunch of super-radical feminists who are seem to view all men as a potential source of sexual violence. Of course, these ladies do not represent all feminists everywhere of ever. If a dude said, "I hate the women who run the sexual assault hotline," or "I hate crazy radical feminists," or "I hate people who see all men as a potential source of sexual violence," I would not have nearly as much of a problem with that statement.

The problem is that a lot of the guys I know have a severe misunderstanding about what feminism is. They might have some idea of second-wave feminism, or radical feminism, which leads them to paint all feminists as "feminizes." Third-wave feminist ideology is completely foreign to them.

This is often accompanied by a severe lack of understanding about how the patriarchy operates, and how misogyny operates. These guys don't understand that sexism with good intentions is still sexism, and frequently engage in this "benevolent sexism." Sometimes they engage in sexism without good intentions as well, as when a friend's boyfriend, standing on the street corner with myself and two other women including his girlfriend, yelled out a slut-shamey comment to two girls walking by in short skirts, and then laughed when we stared at him like he was an alien.

Fortunately, a lot of guys are willing to listen. I actually had a surprisingly nuanced discussion about rape culture with some guy friends one evening. They had never heard or thought about any of that kind of thing before, and they were surprised and kind of horrified to hear about it. Later that same evening, I was harassed by some drunk guys in a cab while walking home. When I told my guy friends about the incident, they were suitably shaken and disgusted.

Anyway, this post seems to have gone on a bit of a tangent (a common theme today… possibly because I'm sick and on pseudoephedrine), but the main point I'm trying to make is this:

A lot of guys that I know are kind of benignly, benevolently sexist. This is largely because they don't understand feminism, and don't understand how privilege and oppression work. (Interestingly, I've found that the guys who are most receptive to conversations about feminism tend to be ones from ethnic minorities.) Most of these guys are relatively open to learning about feminism, and at least try to get rid of their sexism, especially when they see how sexism affects their female friends.

Until recently, I had very few guy friends, and one of the reasons is that I'm a little bit allergic to latent misogyny. Recently I've discovered that as long as a guy is open-minded enough to learn about the patriarchy and how it works, and as long as I can keep myself from being too offended by blanket statements like "I hate feminists", friendship with men who are not already identified as feminists or feminist allies can work.

And that gives me hope. If every woman can introduce a few of her male friends to misogyny and make them face their own privilege, maybe the patriarchal beast will be conquerable.