For a feminist blog, this may seem like the most obvious, clichéd statement in the world. You all know as well as I do (probably better) that millions of articles, books, documentaries, et cetera have treated this very issue. They have treated it kindly, unfairly and everywhere in between. I don’t pretend that I can join their ranks. But I do propose that we all take a moment (maybe more than that) to define feminism for ourselves. Not what we think feminism is, historically, idealistically, for our grandmother, for Phyllis Schlafly or for Betty Friedan. Feminism has become a scary word for most young women. How many times have you heard, “well, I support women’s issues, but I’m not a feminist.” We need to change that. I’m thequeenofscots, and I’m the new Hoochie blogger. I’ll start with this. I am a feminist. No qualifier, no blushing. Let me begin the conversation by telling you a few things about me (in no particular order):

–          I believe wholeheartedly in a woman’s right to choose. I also know that having an abortion is a horrible experience, but if a woman does not want to have a child, she should not have to have a child. For me, the issue is ultimately that simple.

–          I think “man-bashing” is completely destructive and inhibiting. Men can be (and are) feminists, too. We can’t leave them out of the fold.

–          I’ll admit it. I don’t like my body a lot of the time. But it’s so BORING to constantly have the “I’m fat” conversation. As women, we have better things to talk about, and more important things to do than obsessively pick apart our bodies.

–          Finally, I believe that young men and women need to take back feminism. We support women’s issues AND we are feminists!

In her review of Natasha Walter’s new book on British sexism, Living Dolls, Katy Evans takes us from early 20^thcentury Elizabeth Dalloway – feeling liberated in fawn-colored coat on a London bus – to the hypersexuality of modern Britain and “The New Sexism” of surgically enhanced glamour models, pole-dancing, and a Babes-on-the-Bed competition.

More on Living Dolls can be found at The Guardian.

The National Organization of Women has set up an action page, allowing you to instantly contact your House representatives, urging them to oppose further restrictions on abortions through insurance plans funded by the federal government.

Abortion rights opponents are trying to use health reform legislation to impose additional restrictions on abortion services that go far beyond the compromise in the Capps Amendment. Short of a complete ban on abortion coverage, these opponents will try to attach additional restrictions — and they are severe. The Capps Amendment language would require that insurers segregate funds for abortion services so that no public money is used. That requirement is sufficient to continue the harsh Hyde Amendment restrictions already in place.

As a supporter of the National Organization for Women and an ardent advocate for affordable health care for all, [Your name here] want to urge you to hold firm against further attacks by opponents of abortion rights who want to deny all women access to an important health care service.

[Your name here] oppose any effort to exclude abortion services from private health insurance plans.

Over at The Wooden Spoon, lit blogger Daniel E Pritchard considers Ariel Levy in The New Yorker and Marni Soupcoff in the National Post, on the “feminist conundrum”: why and how the word continues to be used pejoratively:

What the movement has become, in some sense, is a movement framed entirely by the politics of the wealthy: you can have a rich liberal woman empowered, or a rich conservative woman empowered, and you are to live vicariously by their success. Practical equality between men and women is no longer the goal of feminism. We also very often frame the role of the wife / mother and husband / father in entirely traditional ways, even when describing the goals of feminism: the woman ‘has the choice’ now, the implication being that the man’s role of financial support is still mandatory while the woman’s role is newly flexible. (Realistically, neither partner probably has a choice at all. Times are tough.)

We’d like to help circulate this list of thirty legislators who were brave enough to stand up in defense of rape and vote against Senator Al Franken’s anti-rape amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill. We applaud these courageous men! Visit this site, and roll over their portraits with your mouse to see each Senator’s contact information. We encourage you to send your kind words to these gentlemen!

Women’s & Gender Studies at SUNY Oneonta publishes a semiannual journal, Phoebe: Gender and Cultural Critique , which fosters intellectual exchanges between scholars of women’s and gender studies & gender & sexuality studies within SUNY, across the country and abroad.

Phoebe publishes works which explore different methodological approaches to provocative questions about gender, and gender’s intersections with sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class. Phoebe has published numerous award winning poets — Wanda Coleman, Lyn Lifshin, Rita Ann Higgins; short storywriters — Merrill Joan Gerber, Janice Eidus, Lisa Chewning; and accomplished scholars — Bettina Aptheker, Teresa Ebert, Marilyn Wesley, Vivien Burr, etc.

The journal accepts submissions year round. Submissions can be mailed to Phoebe, c/o Women’s and Gender Studies, SUNY Oneonta, Oneonta, New York 13820. Authors may also submit by email: sacconj@oneonta.edu

Here’s a scrap of distressingly unreflective sexism from the Wikipedia article on wedding rings:

Women in Greek and Anatolian (comprising most of modern Turkey) cultures sometimes receive and wear puzzle rings – sets of interlocking metal bands that one must arrange just so in order to form a single ring. Traditionally, men wryly gave them as a test of their woman’s monogamy. However, with time and practice it takes little effort to re-make the puzzle and any intelligent woman can learn.

Has Wikipedia been infiltrated by misogynists? Had it not been, we should have been surprised — why should that community be any more secure from such influences than anywhere else on the internet? We should not be surprised, though, to read this kind of wry condescension in articles concerning the Western white wedding. Matrimony as ritualized commodity exchange attracts, for reasons unknown to this lay reader, certain simple conceptions of gender roles and relations.

I do not know, but would like to know, whether there is any regiment of volunteer editors who seek to remove derogatory language, even as there are those who devote their time combing out false facts and tagging unattributed assertions as in need of verification.