Tag Archives: sexism

Recommended Reading for November 9, 2010

John Keilman for the Los Angeles Times: Technology opens new horizons for disabled

Yet for all of technology’s promised advances, some worry that the cost will keep helpful devices out of many people’s reach. Others are concerned that governments, schools and institutions might think that high-tech gadgetry has relieved them of their responsibility to serve the disabled.

“Technology is not a solution for every problem,” said Paul Schroeder of the American Foundation for the Blind. “It doesn’t replace the need for quality teaching. It doesn’t replace the need to teach social skills.”

Crazy Mermaid at Bipolar: Crazy Mermaid’s Blog: Paranoid Schizophrenia: Worst Disease in the World

During the tail end of my psychotic break with reality, I came to believe that there were zombies after me, ready to kill me in order to take over my body. My fear of them taking over my body eventually became so great that I decided to go to the local hospital emergency room, where I thought I would be safe from them.

Liz Sayce at RADAR Network: Health and safety: Stifling disabled people’s independence?

As politicians queue up to cite ever more ludicrous examples of health and safety excesses – making kids wear goggles to play conkers, cancelling historic Gloucestershire cheese rolling events, stopping trainee hairdressers having scissors – those of us living with health conditions or disability sometimes hesitate about which side of this argument we are on.

On the one hand, selected stories like this, designed to justify scrapping regulation, can – as the NASUWT just put it – play politics with children’s safety or put workers at greater risk. On the other, there is a massive history of health and safety being used as an excuse to stop disabled people from doing things. So – whilst I hesitate to join all the people selecting examples of health and safety excesses – we do need to look them in the eye.

Irish Deaf Kids: The Salamanca Statement and EPSEN Act (2004)

A key point:

“regular schools with this inclusive orientation are the most effective means of combating discriminating attitudes, creating welcoming communities, building an inclusive society and achieving education for all; moreover, they provide an effective education to the majority of children and improve the efficiency & ultimately the cost-effectiveness of the entire education system.”

allama at give the feminist a cigarette: Women as sociological ducks

In The Dustbin of History, Greil Marcus warns of the risk of losing sight of individual genius when talking about the blues: yes, it was created in response to slavery and oppression, but centuries of slavery and oppression only produced one Bessie Smith. Seeing Strange Fruit as the inevitable product of the horrors of American history denies the incredible personal achievement of Billie Holiday. And painting female depression as simply a product of the patriarchy denies the personal experience of mental illness to every single sufferer.

incurable hippie at Where’s the Benefit? Round-Up Post

There are plenty of must-read articles and blog posts which I haven’t had the time or the spoons to cover. All of the following are well worth a look.

BADD: A Screenshot’s Worth A Thousand Words

More for Blogging Against Disablism Day.

I just poked around the entry for “Ableism” on Wikipedia. On the Talk page, I found a box placing the Ableism article within WikiProject Sociology:

Screenshot: This article has been rated as Low-importance  on the project's importance scale.

“This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project’s importance scale.”

Ableism of low importance within Sociology? Erm, ooookay. Let’s have a closer look at their definition of “Low-importance”:

This article is of little importance to this project, but it covers a highly specific area of knowledge or an obscure piece of trivia.

20%, people. Disabled people form around 20% of the population in Australia and the USA (and similar numbers in similar societies). One in five. Discrimination is huge, it is institutionalised, it is very often legal. Disabled people are some of the most vulnerable, the most underemployed, the most abused, the most excluded, the most neglected, the most murdered people in our cultures.

“Low importance”? “Obscure piece of trivia”?

OK, so let’s have a look at some other big discriminations. Racism and sexism, are they categorised as obscure pieces of trivia too? (On Wikipedia, I wouldn’t be surprised…)

Screenshot: WikiProject Sociology (Rated Start-Class, High-importance)

Sexism is of High Importance. OK. I agree.

So, racism. I guess the importance of racism within sociology, according to Wikipedians, would be, oh, about similar to that of ableism?

Screenshot: WikiProject Sociology (Rated B-Class, High-importance)

OK, so racism is of High Importance also. OK. I agree with that too.

So why is Ableism of Low Importance? Why does the biggest encyclopedia on earth consider it to be of lesser importance than discrimination against other minorities? Why are sociologists learning and being taught that racism and sexism are The Discriminations, that all others are secondary or tertiary or not really worth bothering about? Why, when a person is both female and PWD, or of colour and PWD, or all three, and/or lesbian, trans, non-citizen, working class, and so on, is ableism automatically ranked as the least important discrimination they’ll encounter? Why are PWD losing this Oppression Olympics, a game we shouldn’t be playing in the first place? (“Intersectionality” hasn’t yet received a rating on the Importance scale at Wikipedia.)

Other topics considered more sociologically important than Ableism (not equal, but more), as far as Wikipedians are concerned, include:

est and The Forum in popular culture

Ralph Larkin

Wilhelm Dilthey

Vixen (comics)

Stay-at-home dad

Weddings in the United States

Truce term

Friendship Paradox

Heterophobia

Babywise

Boomerang Generation

eHarmony

Lavalife

OkCupid

Yahoo! Personals

Fritzl case

List of UFO religions

Greenbelt, Maryland

The Hapa Project

Biosocial criminology

Grand Tour

Speed dating

Blond

Schoolgirl

and Hooters.

For Cereal, Jessica at Jezebel? PTSD after obstetric assault is “hysterical”?

[WARNING: descriptions of obstetric rape and PTSD]

At Jezebel, Jessica writes: Is Having A Baby A Traumatic Event?

A new survey says that 9% of postpartum women suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. You know, the same disorder that Iraq vets and plane crash survivors get. Something does not compute here,[…]

Have we become so precious and hyper-conscious that something women have been doing for time immemorial is now ranked alongside war as a painful event?[…]

Certainly, having a bowling ball of a baby shooting out your vag isn’t a picnic for anyone, but the hysteria surrounding something so matter-of-fact is troubling.

“Hysteria”. Yes, “hysteria”. She went there. She used the prime misogynist slam against women, blaming wandering uteruses. Unbefuckingllievable.

I’m only surprised there wasn’t a “princess” or a “delicate flower” thrown in there too. Or maybe a few accusations of insurance fraud, hm? That would just put the icing on the hateful cake.

Get back to me when you’ve been stripped, dehumanised, isolated, forcibly starved, and strapped to a table for 12 or more hours during the hardest work of your life. Get back to me when you’ve been subjected to a series of non-emergency procedures on your body with neither consent nor medical justification. Get back to me when you’ve been imprisoned in hospital.

Get back to me when you’ve been held down by two or three people while someone – or more than one someone – pushes their fingers into your vagina while you say “No”. Get back to me when you’ve been screaming “NOOOO! STOP!!!” and been ignored while someone cuts your body open and shoves metal forceps into you. Get back to me when you’ve been strapped to a table and operated on and had your protestations about the anaesthetic not working being ignored. Get back to me when you’re left bleeding and vomiting on a table, without access to help, wondering if you’re bleeding to death, and you’ve had your newborn baby taken away from you without explanation or good reason except an over-the-shoulder “we don’t have enough staff right now”.

Get back to me when you’ve spent months of your life – the months you thought would be a joyful, perhaps sleep-deprived, milky daze – having violent flashbacks and nightmares. Shambling through the day barely able to function, unable to bond with your newborn. Bursting into tears and panic attacks many times a day. Avoiding public places lest you suddenly start sobbing and need to run. Not able to have anyone touch you.

Get back to me when you’re hunched in a corner, unable to work, unable to care for yourself, unable to speak, and all anyone can say to you is “All that matters is a live baby”.

I hope you never experience these things. Because they can be horrifying, life-changing, deeply traumatic events. The only promise I can make you is that I won’t call you “precious” or “hysterical” if you’re ever in this terrible position.

Medical assault is assault. Obstetric rape is rape. Trauma is trauma. Some people who have experienced these things get PTSD.

And it’s not up to you, or anyone else, to instruct them that they haven’t – especially in explicitly woman-hating terms.

You don’t get to judge.

No, no, no, no, no.

Recommended Reading for November 18

Should Disabled Characters Only Be Played By Disabled Actors?

I honestly think this is a difficult call. On the one hand the whole point of acting is to take on a personality of someone that isn’t you, hence the point of having straight actors play characters who are gay and vice versa. But there seems to be a catch 22 when it comes to actors who have disabilities. Blind actors are only allowed to play blind characters, which begs the question are they really acting? Obviously they’re not playing themselves, the character likely has personality differences, but why should they be restricted to roles where the audience knows they’re blind? This restriction says to me that directors can’t conceive a blind character playing someone who is sighted and so they don’t allow it, but really they are only restricting the number of roles that blind actors can audition for. So in that case maybe we should be upset that Helen Keller isn’t being played by a young actress who is deaf and/or blind.

The Intel Reader Photographs Text and reads it back to you

Intel’s Reader for the visually impaired isn’t a concept; it goes on sale today. Using an Atom processor, 5-megapixel camera, and Intel’s Linux-based Moblin OS, it turns book pages into digital text and MP3s…then reads aloud in a synthesized voice.

Brand it on the tip of your tongue

no matter how much you are learning, no matter how much power/money/influence you carry, no matter how much you always know the right things to say,

my body is not for you to exam, conquer, or casually observe
as if the strands of my hair were nothing more than pages of a magazine

the creator did not craft these hands, lungs, feet of mine so you can feel good about yourself. my issues are not for you to solve.

who said you could analyze me? i am not a hobby, a project, a case study

Are High Tech Prosthetics Fair?

This past week, another scientific study on running raised the issue of athletes with lower-leg amputations who use high-tech prosthetics having a bionic advantage in contests against ordinary competitors. Increasingly sophisticated innovations — like the carbon-fiber Cheetah Flex-Foot — appear to give amputee sprinters a technological edge in medium-distance races like the 400 meters. Isn’t opening able-bodied competitions to disabled athletes like the double-amputee Oscar Pistorius, fitted out with futuristic J-shaped blade extensions, just political correctness run amok?

ADHD website tells women they’re annoying

Annelise M. sent us a link to a relationships advice slide show at ADDITUDE, a website for people with Attention Deficit Disorder and other learning disabilities. The slide show title is “7 Tips for Better Communication in Your ADHD Relationships.” However, even though men are diagnosed with ADD and ADHD two to four times more often than women, the subtitle makes it clear that the advice is for women only and the text specifies “ADD women” and the “partner” or “spouse” is always a “him” (so also heterosexist). The advice was gender-neutral, but the authors decided to go with gender stereotypes instead.

Recommended Reading for November 13

Mental Health and Promiscuity

However, even in this environment there is one area that has always troubled me and that revolves around the concept of promiscuity as diagnositic criteria.

My first and biggest problem with this is that I have NEVER heard this brought up as a symptom of mental illness when discussing a male. It is always something that is brought up about a female. I can’t help but assume that this is linked to the belief that “excessive” sexual activity is normal for a man and not a symptom of mental illness while no “healthy” woman would engage in or enjoy casual or alternative styles of sex. I also think it is linked to the belief that women are the only ones that have sex with other people due to low self esteem or possibly in a reckless manner because they have some self-destruct tendencies. See, sex is damaging to women, they can’t just enjoy casual encounters or engage in sex purely for self-satisfaction: they must be wounded in some way or they must be wrongly searching for the intimacy they so desire.

Reasonable Accommodation

I find myself caught between disabilities.

One of my most promising paths forward health-wise right now is finding a low-impact, non-repetitive form of exercise. Since I have done yoga in the past, I have been searching for a yoga studio. But since I’m in the western suburbs of St. Louis… there just isn’t much here. The most promising place, that offers classes that fit into my schedule, that is likely to be understanding and accomodating of my back issues, is Bikram.

Now I did Bikram a few years ago and loved it – unfortunately, over the course of a couple of months the humidity in the room (Bikram is “hot” yoga, done in a room that’s about 90 degrees) started making my hearing aids go wonky, so I stopped.

You Can Make Fun Of Us But You Can’t Give Us A Chance

The character was dressed in a blue latex suit that covered his head, and he was constantly babbling like an idiot and drooling on himself. I admit that I found the Handiman skits to be hilarious when when they first premiered. The disabled community had been non-existent in Hollywood up until then, and it continues to be non-existent today, so it was good to see some representation, and me not knowing how much of a negative image it was at the time, appreciated the recognition.

I was in my junior year in high school when Handiman made his debut. Ever since I was mainstreamed back in the fifth grade, I have always caught hell because of my disability. I remember being teased many a-day throughout grade school, high school and even college. Handiman perpetuated the stereotypes that people had about people with disabilities. Even to this day, the techniques have changed, but I pretty much know when people are trying to belittle me. Children aren’t as cunning or crafty to hide their emotions, so they would usually laugh or make “retarded-stupid” comments about me.

The Usefulness Factor

Sometimes you can maintain a career from your own home, such as on the computer or as a consultant on the phone. Sometimes you just need to stop and re-think the whole idea of being useful. The question of “why am I here?” seems to become magnified when you become confined to a small physical space with others doing all the things you used to do for yourself.

But that does not mean you have become useless. It is very easy to fall into the trap of believing that, especially when people say things like, “it must be so nice to be home all the time and do nothing!” It is not particularly nice to have no impressive answer when people ask what you do all day, but if you are able to ignore that and realize that everyone is on this earth for a reason, you are on your way to finding a new sense of purpose. Maybe not a financial one, but perhaps a spiritual one, which is even more important.

In the news:
Francesca Martinez: A Wobbly Girl Battles Against The Last Taboo [Although I disagree with the idea that disability is the “last taboo”]

Francesca Martinez’s victim is squirming. Trapped under the scrutiny of the comedian and fellow members of the audience at her show in Edinburgh, he is clearly wishing for the proverbial hole to open up. “What are you bad at?” asks Martinez. “Football,” comes the sheepish reply. “Were you born like that?” she enquires, head tilted in sympathy, “Couldn’t your mum have had a test when she was pregnant?” Turning to the man’s girlfriend, she simpers: “You are so brave. Well done… Does it mean he can’t have sex?”

Martinez’s humour bears a political sting. As one of a tiny number of disabled performers who have made it into the mainstream, she is not about to waste opportunities to ram home a message. Born with cerebral palsy, the 31-year-old refuses to accept the label of her condition, preferring to describe herself as “wobbly”.