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I am Heidi Anderson, a foxy feminist atheist skeptic fat chick, wife, and mom with a hard-core science fetish!
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A 43-year-old Iranian woman will not be stoned to death after an international campaign launched by her children. It is unclear whether the authorities have lifted the death sentence for alleged adultery against Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani or if she faces execution by another means. I know the dealth penalty has not been lifted permanently, but hopefully the outrage of the world has made an impact here.
However, when the disagreements are between women, certain people like to paint them as “catfights”, which lessens the seriousness of ALL involved (full disclosure – I, Heidi Anderson, am certain people). Women are not a monolithic group, and although many of us call ourselves skeptics AND feminists, we often can not agree on whether skepticism needs feminism, or feminism needs skepticism. Others shun the term feminist completely. Some disagree with sexy behavior at cons, and others think it is good light-hearted fun that brings in people who may normally think skeptics are stodgy old white dudes. Or ONLY stodgy old white dudes. We have disagreements on sexuality, pornography, prostitution, and even things that do not specifically involve women at all (imagine that!) We are labeled too confrontational or too gentle depending on our methods of outreach. And you know what? None of that matters. While we are busy using our freedom to prove ourselves different from our allies on the side of reason, a 42 year old mother of two in Iran is facing a death sentence resulting from a forced confession of adultery. She will be buried up to her chest, and stoned to death. Small stones will be used, so as to slow down her death and cause her more pain. And her “confession”? According to a human rights attorney, it was only gained after 99 lashes. So, as TAM8 approaches, and friends gather, and we have panels on women in skepticism, and skepticism and feminism, and all sorts of things that we as Westerners have the luxury of thinking about, is it too much to ask the skeptical community and blogosphere to investigate this story, and see what REAL DIFFERENCES we can make? Can we step outside, as my friend Will Phillips said, “our tiny little mind boxes” and remember that as we wage these petty wars on each other, a war against reason continues to rage across the globe, with a 42 year old mother of two poised to become the next victim. Getting power OVER people with your sexuality lasts only as long as they find you fuckable. TAKING power through owning your sexuality lasts your whole life. I have nice boobs. Very, very nice boobs in fact. I also like to show my nice boobs and I like it when people look at them. Generally, my goal with showing my boobs is two-fold: 1) everyone in the world will fall madly in love with me and my boobs and 2) I will not look like an apple on sticks. So surely this means I am whipping those sweater puppies out today for Boobquake right? No. Boobquake bothers me. And not for the reasons many people think. First, I hate empty protests. You can only raise awareness so much before you need to act. And raising awareness with people who are already aware is just preaching to the choir.
Social justice movements are not fun. I wonder how fun it was for Rosa Parks to sit in the front of that bus, without even an iPod to block out the people screaming at her? I wonder if Malcolm X was just tempted to wear a t-shirt with a witty saying instead of standing up in front of people who wanted to kill him? Maybe Martin Luther King would have accomplished just as much with an Equality Ho Down in Alabama? Or maybe instead of collaborating with Theo Van Gogh on the film Submission (for which he was ultimately murdered) Ayan Hirsi Ali could have just gone to Cabo for Spring Break and convinced some of the Girls Gone Wild crew to help her write Koran verses on naked young white women? Not so powerful, is it? Aside from the fact that it could be considered not only EXTREMELY culturally insensitive for American women to shove our freedom in the face of Iranian women, how many of the women who participated in Boobquake normally dress modestly? Based on comments, not many. Many of the women just seemed so excited to have a day to “show off the girls!” And therein lies my second point. EVERY DAY should be a day when you feel comfortable expressing your sexuality and seeking sexual attention. Why has this event taken off like it did? Could it be that there is STILL shame in women expressing their sexuality? Of course there is! But you don’t need a fake protest, catcalls from supportive men, alcohol, or the approval of your friends to be sexual. If you dress in a sexual manner, some people will think you are slutty. If you dress in a modest manner, some people will not give you the time of day. But the way we use Halloween, Girl’s Night Out, and now Boobquake as holidays in which “good girls” are given permission to be sexual pisses me off. You don’t NEED permission. You just need courage, and the willingness to take responsibility for your decisions. Part of that responsibility means being willing to give up the labels of good girls and bad girls, and just be. Sexuality is a part of each of us, and people should feel comfortable expressing that in ways they find comfortable. Just don’t hide your need for sexual expression under the guise of the greater good. Because when you do so, you imply that sexual expression for its own sake is invalid. And to me, the greatest reason to be sexual is the pleasure of sexuality itself. Finally, let’s talk about the women who are too much. Tell me about women who are too sexy, show too much, talk too much, do too much. These are the women that cross that line and go into the area that mainstream society starts to frown upon. Talk to me here about girls and women who are viewed to be the “just right” amount of sexiness. How do they dress? How do they act? How do they talk? What risks do they take? These are the females mainstream society holds up as the ideal. Talk to me about prudes – what they are to you, to other people, anything at all about prudes. This is the group considered not sexual enough for mainstream approval. All this recent talk of feminism, sexiness, and societal expectations has spurred something within me. I want to create a list of three categories prude, sexy, whore. In each, I want to have behaviors that typify each definition. Then, I want to somehow graphically show how each of these is a social construct of the time and/or social group. WHO’s IN?????? First things first. In writing about an argument between women in my previous post, I gave the post just about the worst possible title I could have. I apologize for calling it a catfight. It demeans the women involved and was the result of a creative fail, not an attempt to be snarky. Now the title to THIS post?? Mildly snarky, and if you have seen the movie, could be possibly construed as homophobic. See?? Not me. While the majority of the response to my previous post has been positive, I have received a few very impassioned responses on both sides. One side is upset that I have said these things (?) about Skepchick considering some of them are my friends, that I even dare to talk about this considering how much I write and talk about sex, and that I am allowing a supposed personal vendetta against the Skepchicks to get new life. The OTHER side is hoping I will create the anti-Skepchick, fight Rebecca in Las Vegas, and expose her as the supposed downfall to feminism that she is. Uh, no. To both sides. Continue reading I Am Not Spartacus As many of you can guess, I am vehemently pro-choice. It is not because I have a deep hatred for embryos and fetuses, although I have been genuinely interested in only two. Instead for me it is about a woman’s right to control her destiny, and the fact that a woman’s destiny is directly tied to her reproductive freedom. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the dirty sluts should keep their legs crossed, or give it up for adoption. Sure. And men should be forced to account for every loose sperm that escapes from their balls. I tend to get even more crass than usual when discussing abortion, because so much of the crap I hear is from men. It is probably wrong for a self-professed skeptic to admit this, but if you don’t have a uterus, I am less than interested in your take on abortion. I will however, be very interested to know where you are NOT putting your penis to avoid creating a pregnancy. I can refer you to various acts that you as a man can perform to help lower the demand for abortion, including one that involves your head and your asshole. So the SC Legislature has recently tried to introduce legislation that would try to get women to “wait” for 24 hours before having an abortion. Presumably to pray and meditate, or perhaps create a Facebook poll to get input from friends and family (Should Heidi have an abortion? Here are my top five reasons she should!) This is so insulting to women, and I can’t understand the ethics of forcing me to wait for a legal procedure. Do they make men wait 24 hours before filling a Viagra prescription? Do they make women or men wait 24 hours before agreeing to have sex that could result in a pregnancy? Do I need to wait 24 hours before getting breast implants to to increase my sex appeal and chances of having recreational sex? (Ok those who know me, who is laughing at the idea of ME with implants!) A quick shout out to all those having gay sex; I am also vehemently pro-sodomy, pro-oral, and pro-mutual masturbation – straight people can learn much from you! It seems that people want women to focus on the importance of the decisions they make about abortion. We always hear about women who regretted their decision, or those who struggled long and hard and felt it was the ONLY decision for them. What about another group? The group that thinks about the decision rationally, makes a plan, goes through with the plan, and does not regret it? Are we so used to women being thought of as irrational that we believe they need extra time to make decisions? Is this the reproductive health version of hitting from the red tees? I have personally never had an abortion, but I would have. I have been sexually active since 17, and was so frightened of pregnancy that I was on the Pill AND used condoms. I was semi-selective about my partners, and very good at sexual negotiation. Mostly. There was a Russian exhange student who got the short end of the stick, but that was the stick’s fault, not mine. And it was a tree, not a stick. No thank you! Bigger is not always better, fellas. Had I gotten pregnant in high school and college, I would certainly have had an abortion. In fact, had I tried to keep the pregnancy, my family would have been disappointed. People in our family did not have children early, as it was seen as an impediment to reaching life goals. And the majority of the time, it is. Teen moms face a rough road, a road that is often NOT made better by those who pressure teens to continue their pregnancies. My parents made sure that I knew about sex, and raised me to make my own sexual decisions. My sex life was not seen as an expression of their parenting, but an expression of my love/lust/boredom/whatever I chose it to be. In fact, when I lost my virginity at 17, I read up on sex like it was a final, told my mother that I wanted to spend the night with the guy to make it easier emotionally (to which she laughed) and informed my boyfriend that we would both achieve orgasm prior to intercourse in order to make it less painful for me and longer lasting for him. I was on the pill for three months prior to the event, and do not regret the experience at all. In fact, it was the best possible event a girl could have, save for having rose petals sprinkled on the sheets, which I found out a friend of mine did when he deflowered his girlfriend. So even though I never experienced pregnancy until I was ready, I was there for friends and family when they had their abortions. I used to volunteer as an escort at an abortion clinic in college, and the taunts of the protesters were always so hilarious to me. In fact, the protester who called me a Cosmo girl was always my favorite. Sadly, she was the only person to ever see me as a glamorous sexual adventurer, and I miss her. However, the morning I took my friend to have an abortion, it was not so funny. Now, I am all about freedom of speech, and their right to protest, but I can still get mad at them. Here was a person who had made a decision about a LEGAL MEDICAL PROCEDURE. Can you imagine your private medical decisions being met with public protest? When you decide to go on Paxil, what if Tom and Katie showed up with little Suri holding a sign protesting against psychiatry? Or what if when you got a vasectomy, the Catholic Church showed up protesting non-procreative sex? Or you decide, smartly I may add, to vaccinate your child, and Jim Carey and Jenny McCarthy show up and throw breast implants at you? Of the numerous people I know who have had abortions, not one regrets the decision. NOT ONE! Now of course the plural of anecdote is not evidence, but I would have expected at least one of the women in my life to tell me how they wish they had thought about it more, or that they mourned the loss of the pregnancy. Instead, I heard stories about how the availability of safe and legal abortion allowed them to achieve goals in their life that would have been denied, and would have prevented the family they currently had. None of them took the decision lightly, and all of them understood exactly what the procedure was. My friends were thoughtful rational creatures, who were capable of making decisions about their body on their own. They were not stupid then, and women are not stupid now. I don’t know where (Atlanta??) or when, but 2009 will be the year that Bar Camp is introduced to the POWER OF THE VAGINA. To paraphrase a famous bard, it’s bitchcamp, bitches! Even the internet respects its almighty power. Google the soothsayer, when asked to magically retrieve information about bitchcamp, asks “Did you mean witchcamp?” Yes, motherfucker, I did! bitchcamp will follow the Bar Camp format. What is Bar Camp? Glad you asked! Bar Camp is an ad-hoc What bitchcamp is: same thing, but for bitches! I wanted to create an environment for all the women I love to come together (hee hee) and share information, talents, and ideas. The first rule of bitchcamp is that YOUR RULES DO NOT APPLY TO ME!But seriously, here are the rules, stolen shamelessly from the Bar Camp website: Any bitch with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join. When you come, be prepared to share with bitchcampers. When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world. NO SPECTATORS, ONLY PARTICIPANTS Attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one, or otherwise volunteer / contribute in some way to support the event. All presentations are scheduled the day they happen. Prepare in advance, but come early to get a slot on the wall. The people present at the event will select the demos or presentations they want to see. Presenters are responsible for making sure that notes/slides/audio/video of their presentations are published on the web for the benefit of all and those who can’t be present. The Rules of bitchcamp
www.bitchcamp.net coming soon! A letter to the editor I just sent to the Spartanburg Herald Journal:
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I had this argument with people about the “green screens for Iran” and the debate about calling for the arrest of the Pope. Talking about things all day long is great and can make you feel good and smart. But to accomplish anything in this world, you have to do work. And do you know why its called work? BECAUSE IT IS WORK!