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Image:  Women Friendly Cities Challenge After the recent, horrific murders in Atlanta of eight people , six of whom were Asian or Asian-American spa workers, there was a lot of discussion online about the nature of these killings. Were they acts of anti-Asian hatred? Were they acts of misogyny? Were they motivated by the hatred of sex workers, as evidenced from the shooter's statements?  Is there another choice, all of the above?  This is where the concept of intersectionality comes in. This word was likely in use for many years before I first became aware of it, in around 2015. I am usually quite late to language changes, so we can assume it was in use among activists far longer than that.  Like most words used by theorists and activists, as  intersectionality  has slowly drifted into common parlance, it is often misused and misunderstood. Eventually it will be -- or perhaps it already has been, who can keep up? -- co-opted by the right-wing to mean somet...

I recently completed three booklists for library customers, part of a system-wide readers' advisory project. The lists use good gender balance, and a strong representation of people of colour and LGBT themes. I did classics , award-winning nonfiction , and essay collections . I love readers' advisory, and I really enjoyed the challenge of writing about each title in about 45 words. In the list of essay collections, I included Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me . Then I decided it was time to read it! She's a brilliant essayist, one of the best I've ever read, and an important feminist voice. This slim collection packs an enormous punch. Reading Solnit's  now-famous piece about mansplaining made me think of another, related phenomenon. Both my partner and I have noticed this in discussions online, in a context where the commenters are mostly male. Here's how it goes. A man comments.  Many people disagree with him, including me. The man attacks me. Onl...

United States Vice Presidents After the positive result in the US election, so many of my fellow leftists refuse to find joy in the occasion. They seem determined to not admit that something good happened. The worst president in the history of the United States has been handed his walking papers. This is a good thing!  Does that mean I expect anything but business as usual from a Joe Biden administration? Of course not! But will Trump's ouster improve people's lives? Absolutely it will. People's lives are more important than Marxist theory. Reform is not The Answer but it is a net positive, and that counts. Some other good things happened in this election, too. * The first female Vice President was elected! She is also the first person of colour to hold that position, both Black and South Asian. Does this mean I love Kamala Harris? Of course not! But visibility is important. Diversity is important. This moves the needle. Full stop. * All four of the Congressmembers referred...

September 28 is International Safe Abortion Day , a day to reflect on how many women around the world do not have control over their reproduction -- that is, do not have control over their lives.  Abortion is the sine qua non  of women's liberation. Without the ability to choose whether and when to have children, women are slaves to their reproductive organs, and to the governments that control them.  We would all prefer contraception to abortion. But, like abortion, contraception is not universally available. And more importantly, contraception fails. Sometimes that results in happy accidents. Sometimes it results in unwanted pregnancies that would be disastrous for the pregnant person's life.  There is no reason for an unwanted pregnancy to ruin a woman's life. Abortion is a safe and harmless procedure. But thanks to governments that allow themselves to be controlled by religious zealots, millions of women don't have access to this option. Not about RBG, not about ...

  These highlights of Ginsburg's decisions and dissents on the SCOTUS are a joy to read. I used two sources, and decided to keep the overlap. Many highlight the reason she was affectionately known as the Notorious RBG. United States v. Virginia , 1996 In United States v. Virginia,   Ginsburg  wrote the majority opinion that would serve as a milestone moment for women’s rights and university admission policies. The case challenged a policy by the Virginia Military Institute that barred women from being admitted to the institution. Although the state of Virginia said it would create a separate educational program for women for the military institute, Ginsburg questioned its merits, writing that “Women seeking and fit for a VMI-quality education cannot be offered anything less, under the Commonwealth’s obligation to afford them genuinely equal protection.” “Neither federal nor state government acts compatibly with equal protection when a law or official policy denies t...

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution by Jonathan Eig was a fascinating and very readable look at how oral contraceptives -- otherwise known as The Pill -- came to be. The Pill changed the world. It was the first contraception that was nearly 100% effective, easy to use, did not interrupt or alter sex, and crucially, controlled by the woman who used it. It was also the first option to be both effective and reversible; pre-Pill, the only completely effective birth-control was sterilization. The advent of oral contraceptives, and later, the availability of safe and legal abortion, liberated millions of women from the fear of unwanted pregnancy, and in doing so, lifted millions of children out of poverty, by giving women the ability to limit the size of their families. Eig tells the story through the lens of four people -- all iconoclasts, all rebels, and none of them saints. Safe, effective, reversible, female-controlled, non-barrier birth co...

Today is International Safe Abortion Day. Because without access to safe, legal abortion, women can never be free. In North America, you can help ensure that women are able to access safe abortions by donating to abortion funds. The National Network of Abortion Funds (N-NAF) can show you how.

Also: Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering for certain men , Jennifer O'Connell, Irish Times Canada's #climatestrike day is Friday, September 27.

Reading David Blight's monumental Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom , I learned some facts about both Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony that were very unpleasant and, at least in Douglass' case, baffling. This brought me back to a topic I've revisited several times on wmtc: the rejection of art or culture or historical admiration, based on some moral or ethical failing of the individual. I only want to know about perfect people I was amazed to learn that Douglass himself could be racist! In his speeches, he used the stereotype of the drunken Irish immigrant to bolster his case for universal suffrage: if this lout is allowed to vote, why not the Negro? Douglass also had a huge blind spot regarding Native Americans. He would contrast the civilized, educated Negro with the Native American who preferred their own savage and backwards ways to that of the white settler. Douglass did (verbally) to Native Americans what white oppressors were doing to African Americans --...

Tl;dr? Learn about the National Network of Abortion Funds , and give generously. * * * * Right-thinking Americans and Canadians are reeling at extreme anti-abortion laws sweeping through at least a dozen states: Alabama, Missouri, and Georgia, are the worst offenders, but Ohio, North Dakota, Kentucky, Mississippi, Iowa, and others are not far behind. Most of these laws are blatantly unconstitutional, and are designed to force SCOTUS to overturn with  Roe v. Wade . These latest lethal weapons are the logical progression of the War on Women that's been going on for at least 30 years. Democrats and most liberal Americans sat idly by while anti-abortion-rights forces took over one state legislature after the next, setting up obstacle after obstacle designed to prevent access to safe, legal abortion, thereby limiting the human rights of great swaths of American women. While all anyone could talk about was Roe v. Wade , that poorly-written law became irrelevant for millions of women. Ame...

During the Ontario provincial election, after a hack from the Toronto Sun drew attention to an unpopular view that I had expressed some years earlier, I was the object of right-wing attacks by email and on social media. Many of these wingnuts referenced my weight in various disgusting ways. This shocked me because, although I am overweight, I'm not unusually heavy, not large enough to be remarkable. No matter. Total strangers mocked me for being overweight, using a whole slew of pejoratives and curse-words. I had never experienced that before. I confess that even though I couldn't possibly care less what trolls think of me, each time this happened, I felt a brief pang of humiliation and embarrassment. I've always been impervious to right-wing bullying; if anything, I wear it with pride. But these taunts hurt, if only for a split-second. I wish this weren't true. I'm embarrassed to admit it. I thought of this experience as I read Roxane Gay's powerful book, Hung...

Are you writing for rights? I almost gave myself a pass this year. I'm living out of a hotel room and I don't have easy access to a printer, and... what the hell? I'm one of the most privileged people on the planet. Surely I won't skip Write For Rights because it's a bit inconvenient! On December 10, 1948, the newly-formed United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , the first document of its kind in history. Every year, on and around December 10, people who have human rights use them to help others whose human rights have been violated or negated. Here are the 2018 Write For Rights cases. Notice anything different? Join me and thousands of others. Join the biggest human rights event on the planet. By giving 15 or 30 minutes of your time, you can join thousands of others who believe that all humans have rights, no matter who they are, where they live, and what they believe. The right to peaceful protest. The right to inform others. The right ...

I recently read these somewhat old, but still relevant, letters to the New York Times Book Review. Cost of the Crash To the Editor: In his review of “Crashed,” by Adam Tooze (Aug. 12) , Fareed Zakaria asserts that “the rescue worked better than almost anyone imagined.” He notes there was no “double-dip recession” and growth returned “slowly but surely.” But this misses what was the major criticism of the “rescue.” It merely hit the re-set button — keeping the big banks solvent. Meanwhile, the stimulus did little to put people back to work. It was not the double-dip recession that critics feared but a long sluggish recovery that failed to affect the majority of the people. For example, it took six years (2009-15) for the unemployment rate to return to the pre-recession number. The share of income received by the top 1 percent had been 23 percent before the recession. After falling to 18 percent in 2010 it jumped back to 22 percent by 2015. Meanwhile, as late as 2015, the bottom 99 perc...

While this blog was offline, an amazing and incredibly important thing happened: the people of the Republic of Ireland affirmed the human right to control our own bodies. In a referendum to "Repeal the 8th" -- so-called for the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland, which gave equal legal status to women and embryos or fetuses -- the overwhelming majority of Irish people voted yes  to repeal the total ban on abortion. For me, the way this happened was almost as important as the result: it was a true grassroots organizing campaign. Person to person, street by street, town by town, Irish people talked and discussed and declaimed and debated. The vote was overwhelmingly in favour of repeal: 66.4% voted to repeal. With this, Ireland has at last " stepped into the light ". One of the most touching details of the #RepealThe8th campaign was #HomeToVote , which saw Irish citizens living all over the world traveling to Ireland to cast their vote to repeal. Reading...

Visit We Own It for all the facts on privatization. When public services are privatized, everyone loses -- except, of course, shareholders of a private company, who increase their wealth with our  money. But did you know the pain of privatization hits women disproportionately harder? As this excellent article by Jane Stinson in Canadian Dimension says: Privatization is not gender-neutral. It threatens advances toward women’s equality in the labour market and in the home. In the labour market, privatization usually means lower wages for women workers, fewer workplace rights, reduced health and welfare benefits, no pension coverage, less predictable work hours, more precarious employment, a heavier workload and generally more exploitative working conditions. In addition, in a society where women are still the primary caregivers for both children and the elderly, when services become both scarcer and more expensive , women's burdens grow -- often while their wages are shrinking. Th...

Today's Revolutionary Thought of the Day is very unusual, in that it belongs to a member of government. This thought should not be revolutionary. It should not even need to be uttered. Nevertheless, it is and it does. It has come to my attention that there are young girls here in Canada and other parts of the world who are removed from school or shamed because of their hairstyle. Mr. Speaker, body-shaming of any woman in any form from the top of her head to the soles of her feet is wrong. Irrespective of her hairstyle, the size of her thighs, the size of her hips, the size of her baby bump, the size of her breasts, or the size of lips, what makes us different makes us unique and beautiful. So Mr. Speaker I will continue to rock these braids. For three reasons. No. 1, because I’m sure you’ll agree, they look pretty dope. No. 2, in solidarity with women who have been shamed based on their appearance. And No. 3, and most importantly, in solidarity with young girls and women who look ...

I've been scanning some old photos -- some of Allan and me through the years, others with my siblings at various ages -- and have been posting them on Facebook. This experience has led to two insights. The thoughts themselves aren't new, but this walk on memory lane has recalled and reinforced them. Insight number one: my self-image was extremely distorted throughout my life.  I thought I was fat and ugly. Yet there is evidence that that was not the case. I am now overweight, but that's a different story. This was a girl well within a normal, healthy weight and size range, thinking she was seriously overweight. It was no surprise that many of my female Facebook friends related to this. We came up with the following list of reasons. The reasons are not ranked in order of importance; it's a big mix, a preponderance of evidence, as the legal phrasing goes. 1. Media. We are constantly barraged with images of what is supposed to be beauty perfection; most are completely unre...