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Before it became just another Hallmark holiday, to be celebrated like all other holidays with cards and gifts and fripperies, Mother's Day was ... ... a war protest. It was about women saying, "No, you cannot take this young man I spent 18 years teaching how to be a decent human being, and turn him into a monster, and then get him killed in your STUPID WAR." It was about the shameful waste of human potential that every war entails. You can read the original proclamation here. It begins: Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears! Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
Tags: gender studies, holiday, politics
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This article popped up on an email list I frequent: People of Lesbos take gay group to court over term 'Lesbian'
By NICHOLAS PAPHITIS
Wednesday, April 30, 2008 9:45 AM CDT
ATHENS, Greece - A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos and the world's gay women.
Three islanders from Lesbos _ home of the ancient poet Sappho, who praised love between women _ have taken a gay rights group to court for using the word lesbian in its name.
One of the plaintiffs said Wednesday that the name of the association, Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece, "insults the identity" of the people of Lesbos, who are also known as Lesbians.
"My sister can't say she is a Lesbian," said Dimitris Lambrou. "Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos," he said.
The three plaintiffs are seeking to have the group barred from using "lesbian" in its name and filed a lawsuit on April 10. The other two plaintiffs are women.
Also called Mytilene, after its capital, Lesbos is famed as the birthplace of Sappho. The island is a favored holiday destination for gay women, particularly the lyric poet's reputed home town of Eressos.
"This is not an aggressive act against gay women," Lambrou said. "Let them visit Lesbos and get married and whatever they like. We just want (the group) to remove the word lesbian from their title."
He said the plaintiffs targeted the group because it is the only officially registered gay group in Greece to use the word lesbian in its name. The case will be heard in an Athens court on June 10.
Sappho lived from the late 7th to the early 6th century B.C. and is considered one of the greatest poets of antiquity. Many of her poems, written in the first person and intended to be accompanied by music, contain passionate references to love for other women.
Lambrou said the word lesbian has only been linked with gay women in the past few decades. "But we have been Lesbians for thousands of years," said Lambrou, who publishes a small magazine on ancient Greek religion and technology that frequently criticizes the Christian Church.
Very little is known of Sappho's life. According to some ancient accounts, she was an aristocrat who married a rich merchant and had a daughter with him. One tradition says that she killed herself by jumping off a cliff over an unhappy love affair.
Lambrou says Sappho was not gay. "But even if we assume she was, how can 250,000 people of Lesbian descent _ including women _ be considered homosexual?"
The Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece could not be reached for comment. My thoughts... 1) Someone should really enlighten these people about the perfect-failure record of attempts to legislate language. 2) I don't suppose it occurred to any residents of the island of Lesbos that they could simply pick one of the several other methods of changing a place name into a term for its residents: Lesbosite, Lesbish, Lesbese, etc. 3) They probably haven't thought of the potential devastation that a winning verdict would have on Lesbos' tourism industry, either. I doubt that homosexual women would take the insult kindly. It's a tiny island; they probably can't afford that kind of loss. 4) This overlap actually appears in my main SF setting. One planet in the Freedom System, Gomorrah, has an island continent (its only continent, in fact) called Lesbos. Its residents call themselves Lesbians, whether they are lovers of women or not. (Many are: that planet was settled mainly by women-loving-women.) They find the overlap charming ... probably in much the same way that many Texans are tickled to be called "cowboys" even if they don't make a living from cattle. Tags: gender studies, politics
Current Mood: busy
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The military has a severe problem of sexual harassment, abuse, and outright rape. The same thing happens in many of the mercenary companies hired to do military-style work. This is not news, although the various reported examples are horrifying. But something in this one caught my eye: "Crimes happen when you bring people together anywhere, and in a war setting, without adult supervision, crimes are going to increase." Read that again: "without adult supervision"Our soldiers aren't adults? The mercenaries our government is hiring aren't adults? They're holding weapons, in some cases including actual weapons of mass destruction, and they can't be trusted without adult supervision? Exactly who is supposed to be in charge of this Grade-A, chrome-plated, cluster-shaped quasi-reproductive activity? Tags: gender studies, politics
Current Mood: busy
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![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) haikujaguar pointed me towards this essay about how the 5 judges for the World Fantasy Award are all white men. Again. I am disappointed. It's not just that there's a problem with sexism and racism in speculative literature. That's old news. I'm disappointed for practical reasons. I sit on a lot of panels, and have attended many more from the audience. And you know what? Homogenous panels tend to be boring. The more similar the panelists in terms of gender, ethnicity, educational background, religion, socioeconomic status, etc. -- the more likely they are to agree on everything. There's not enough parallax between their viewpoints to create the kind of binocular vision that makes a diverse panel interesting. Put a Christian and a Pagan on the panel, and you will not be bored ... they might rip each other's heads off, or they might have a congenially heated debate about the appropriateness of proselytizing to aliens, but they will definitely not agree about everything. Put a fair-skinned person, a brown-skinned person, and a yellow-skinned person on a panel, and raise the issue of racism in the distant future. Entertaining mayhem will ensue. Convince (or bribe) a man to sit on a gender studies panel with the women who usually show up for such things. Better yet, get two, one straight and one gay. Now that's going to be fun. But if all the panelists are alike, the discussion tends to devolve into yeah-yeah land. Judging from what I've seen of the speculative genre, the same thing happens when you pick a panel of judges who are all white men. You wind up with book after book of McRenaissance. And then people yawn and grumble and dismiss the awards as irrelevant, which is sad. Surely we could do better than this. Tags: fantasy, gender studies
Current Mood:  disappointed
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Here's a disturbing article about maternal profiling, or refusing to hire women because they are (or might become) mothers. On the one hoof, it is wrong to discriminate against people because of their family situation; this is just another example of oppressing women by making it hard for them to get a job. On the other hoof, I can sympathize with very small businesses that may only have a few employees, and who need someone who can afford to make that job their top priority. Mothers are reliable, but they tend to put family first, which is as it should be. A large business can cover for an absent employee; a small one might not be able to. It's an interesting and disturbing dilemma. The best solutions are all macro, and would require society at large to say, "This is bad; we must fix it." Frex, it could be solved by changing wages so that only one parent needed to work, allowing the other to stay home and raise the kids. That would only help married parents, though. So another approach would be to revive the extended family, so that even single parents would have someone to help with childcare. A big business can (and a few do) provide services such as company daycare or even day-nannies to watch sick kids at home. More universal options could be made available to cover people working at small businesses. But I doubt people will do any of these things, because it's easier and cheaper simply to let women shoulder the (sometimes crushing) burden. That's frustrating -- and it is not good for family life or the economy. *ponder* Though businesses might consider catering to mothers with a deal like "You can always take time off to take care of your kids, if you make up for it by doing X, Y, and Z." An exchange of favors is fair, and employees can become intensely loyal to a company that offers valuable perks that other companies don't. Look how some companies have become hotbeds of queer tolerance and creativity. Tags: gender studies
Current Mood: busy
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