I know you're out there, fellow Oklahoma residents and Kossacks!  Why don't we see how many of us there really are?

a.k.a. Know Thyself, Love Thyself, Love Someone Else

During the last "progress report", several people voiced a desire for a diary or two about relationships.  I'm certainly not Dear Abby but I've seen more relationships fail than I can count (and a few succeed)....  My family is huge, thanks to my father's 4 marriages, plus my own in-laws and friends.  So I figured I could put all that knowledge of others to good use and offer you what I know about how to make sure you're ready for a long-term, happy, healthy relationship.

I have seen a lot of claims that the recent moves to outlaw certain kinds of abortion (and likely eventually all kinds) is not that big a deal.  Many, many self-proclaimed progressives and liberals do not seem to understand the vital connection between abortion rights and the rights of women; many do not seem to understand that women cannot advance in this society unless we have a solid foundation of being able to make reproductive decisions for ourselves.

So I'm going to tell you a story.  This is the story of women in our society.  Not all individual women could tell you this story as their own.  Yet it is still the story of women, since it touches the lives of almost every woman in some small way at least.  This is the story told in statistics and statements, a story about the disproportionate burdens and disadvantages that women face as a result of one unique facet of their physical selves and thus, the story of why a movement that focuses on women's control of their own reproduction is vital if we ever wish to achieve anything, in the Daily Kos community, as Democrats, and as a society.

One of the great disappointments in my life as a woman and a feminist is the absurd dearth of women in history.  I know we existed; none of us would be here if we hadn't.  I am sure we didn't just raise babies and cook (not that there's anything wrong with that!  Again, none of us would be here if it weren't for women's performance of the tasks most basic to sustaining our lives) while the men-folk got their names passed down through the generations.  There definitely are some famous women (Marie Curie, Cleopatra, and Eleanor Roosevelt, to name a few off the top of my head) but they seem so few and far between.  Since I've been running across some less famous but historically significant women, and since it's Women's History Month, I thought we could all share who our favorites are and give each other the lessons in women's history that we never got in school.

The one thing that we all have in common here at WAYWO is that we like to spend our spare time using (and abusing) our bodies.  Whether you knit, sew, bake, garden, build bookshelves, build websites, or any of the other things that we all end up talking about in WAYWO,  you are using your body a lot and, if you're anything like me, you often forget you even have a body until it's too late and you're really sore!  

I got a bit more than I had bargained for when I picked up Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America".  I not only got a lesson in what life is like for the poorest amongst us, I got a new perspective on parts of my own life.

Feminism is, by it's very nature, concerned with gender in all its crazy trappings.  It is, after all, "the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men; an organized movement for the attainment of such rights for women."  Yet we all define gender - or sex, or whatever word it is you use to explain this arbitrary categorization - differently, and we have all had different experiences with it.  At the same time, we traffic in it; our discussions are necessarily filled with talk about gendered roles.

When we talk about discrimination, we almost always talk about individual acts of discrimination.  But there are at least two different kinds of discrimination - institutional being the other, in my mind - and ignoring either one means ignoring a significant front in our quest to improve on the equal opportunities of every human being.  In honor of yesterday, I'll use examples of racism to talk about the two different kinds of discrimination, but this applies to all forms: sexism, classism, ageism, etc.

I'm sort of filling in for someone else tonight, and decided to write a new diary even though I didn't have a lot of time to do it, so if this isn't exactly as profound as you've come to expect from this series, I apologize.  The other diary I'm working on is a slow-cooker that needs more thought before I'll feel like it's worthy.

Instead, I thought it'd be cool to talk about James Bond.

Welcome to the first discussion thread of the Daily Kos Book Club!  I hope you will find a comfortable chair and settle in to discuss Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle" with us.  Even if you haven't read the book, you're welcome to join in the discussion where you can; there are plenty of subjects that will be brought up that don't necessarily depend on having read the book.  As Solzhenitsyn himself said, "Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society . . . loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read."

(Okay, so this won’t necessarily have that big of an effect on civility, and it’s not so much a ‘project’ as something that I’m proposing be adopted by everyone for all time, but I had to come up with a catchy name.)

We’ve seen a lot of ideas on ways to improve the community interactions here lately, and now I’m throwing in my own 2 cents.

When I started thinking about what kinds of books we should read in our new Daily Kos Book Club, I tried to think of all the books I’ve read that had a real impact on my political beliefs.  I don't think we necessarily have to read just overtly political books, but it seemed like the best place to start considering everyone here is obviously interested in politics.

This time, we decided on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s "The First Circle".  

One of the things that we find ourselves talking about a lot as feminists is how hostile many people are towards women and towards policies or beliefs that would generally improve women’s lives.  It is the most obvious thing to talk about; if someone, say, calls you a murderer for believing that women have the right to an abortion, it has a huge impact.

But there is another kind of sexism that is much more insidious than "hostile" sexism.  It’s called "benevolent sexism".

We often talk about the things we face in our everyday lives that hold us back - the small and large discriminations that women face simply because we are women.  But I would like to talk about a different subject today, a much more difficult obstacle: the internalization of negative beliefs and the limitations we place on ourselves because of them.

I wasn't raised to be a feminist.  The women who I consider my feminist idols never used the word or had anything to do with feminism that I know of.  But they instilled in me a very strong belief that gender had little to do with any of my abilities, that I could do anything and being female never even factored into that.  These women are the reason I am who I am, and I wanted to honor them by making them the subject of the first in a new series of weekly feminist diaries.

I believe the next step for feminism is to include men too.  And I believe this can only be achieved by including a focus on the ways that men are also oppressed by societal standards.

Don't get me wrong: I am a feminist, and I still think feminism needs to support and work for women.  I wasn't around for most of the history of feminism, having been born around the dawn of the '80s, but I wish I had been just so that I could have participated in it.  What I am suggesting is not that we abandon feminism, but that we modify it slightly in order to show others that feminism and feminist concerns actually impact everyone, and therefore can be advantageous to us all.

Obviously, there is still a long way to go in gaining equality for women.  There is so much subtle sexism that still needs to be dealt with in our own lives, and overt sexism such as how women candidates are judged.  But how do we change these things?  How do we take that next step?  What can we do next (and what can we do even while fighting against the regressive policies that are popping up everywhere)?  What is my generation's Seneca Falls going to be?

I wanted to have a much more universally interesting diary to end my long drought, but I am going to ask something simple and personal.

What movies really made you, or your children, start questioning the world when you were young?

Follow me for why...

(crossposted on Empires to Ashes)

Bush is not, in fact, responsible for the failure to act after Hurricane Katrina.  

Just like he wasn't responsible for using bad intelligence to get us into the Iraq War, or for the horrible torture of people at Abu Ghraib.