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It feels like just yesterday that I sat down to write Feminism & Gender in 2006: The Good, The Bad, and the Underwearless. And, like last year, 2007 seems to have flown by. (Is it just me, or did a year take forever to pass back in the good old days?) Now 2007 is almost gone, and like every year preceding it, it was chock full of fun moments, outrage and fury, progress, and unfortunate events. I thought a quick recap of some of the important things that happened this year under the rubric of Feminism & Gender would again be enlightening, this time as we look toward 2008. Without further ado, in no order whatsoever, I present 2007:
Work: The porn industry is the only industry in which women out-earn men, and it seems that in 2006-2007, more job opportunities than ever opened up for "mature" women in the porn industry. the pay gap between men and women still exists. Elena Centor shredded holes into a flawed study that showed that women are evil bosses that the mainstream media played up. web conferences tend to not include many women (although women outnumber men online); SXSW defies this rule of thumb. Not surprisingly, it turns out that American women with children are not "opting" out of work, but are being driven out of the workplace because few places have family-friendly policies. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), was originally was written to ban and provide remedies for "employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, , but "gender identity" was dropped for political expediency.
Sports: Women runners were furious about an article that claimed that most women are not biologically suited to run. Cheerleaders protested being forced to cheer at girls' sporting events. (I stand by my belief that the biggest obstacle to women's equality are women themselves.) After 123 years, Wimbledon finally decides to live up to US Open and Australian Open standards and pay men and women the same amount of money. Don Imus slurs the good names of the Rutgers Women's Basketball team and eventually loses his job over his inappropriate remarks. A Los Angeles Times sportswriter undergoes a sex change and no one cares. Petition to support Title IX is available.
You're gorgeous as you are, except that you need a lot of products and procedures, aka beauty: The grooming playing field for grooming evens out a slight bit when Norelco introduces the Bodygroomer for men, noting that body hair is not only unsightly on women. MAC cosmetics launches a human Barbie line. The national chapter of Delta Zeta sorority purges its DePauw branch of all women deemed to smart, fat, and/or ugly; half of the remaing members sisters rally around them and quit to protest such absurd discrimination. Several ads from Dove's "real beauty" Pro-Age campaign are banned because the over-50 women in the ads appear nude in profile. The amount of photo retouching that goes on in magazines is incredible. (See: Faith Hill and Redbook; America Ferrera in Glamour.) Thanks for photoshopped pictures, girls take up unhealthy habits that can cause death so they can be unrealistically thin.
Reproductive rights and freedom: In January, legislation was introduced to ban abortion in Virginia the second Roe v. Wade is overturned. Three honor students in New York are suspended from their high school for saying "vagina" during a production of The Vagina Monologues. The Supreme Court upheld an abortion ban that does not allow doctors to consider a woman's health needs. The shit hits the fan when legislators with ties to Merck make the Gardisil vaccine against HPV mandatory. some women's health advocates find themselves aligned with conservatives in protesting the vaccine. Yay - Plan B has been available over-the-counter to women over 18 years old at pharmacies that will stock it for one year! Anti-choice protestors terrorize and prevent women from using a new Planned Parenthood clinic in Aurora, IL, although most women who use the service are there for health purposes like pap smears that they can't receive from other health care providers for a variety of reasons. Should 6th graders have access to birth control pills?
