American Association of University Women – Two Minute Activist.

Sociological Images has another fun post (remember the Supreme Court, “I’m not a doctor but I play one on the Supreme Court.)

Now they have taken a look at Disney princesses.

See the full post here : Contexts

Or see another blogger’s addition of the princes to this sociological study.

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From the “some people have too much time on their hands” department.  Evolutionary Psychology.  Say what?

From the Psychology today blog

The Scientific Fundamentalist

Do Married Women Want Their Husbands to Cheat?

Once married to a man, it is in the reproductive interest of the woman to monopolize access to all of his resources (material or otherwise) so that he would invest them in her joint children with him.  Any sexual relationship he may have with other women might potentially jeopardize her exclusive access to his resources, so obviously it is in her interest to make sure that he does not have sexual relationships with other women.

The problem, however, is that, as I explain in a previous post, mating among all mammalian species (including humans) is a female choice; it happens whenever and with whomever the female wants, not whenever and with whomever the male wants.  The more desirable a man is (the more resourceful, the higher his social status, the physically more attractive), the larger the number of other women who would want to have sex with him regardless of whether he is married, either in an attempt to steal him away from his current mate (mate poaching) or in an attempt to be impregnated by him so that their child will have his superior genes but then to turn around and pass off the child as their current long-term mates’ genetic offspring (cuckoldry).

All women have a vested reproductive interest to marry a man who is as desirable and attractive (physically and otherwise) as possible, but the more desirable and attractive the husband is, the greater the chances that other women would want him as well and thus the greater the chances that he would be unfaithful.  There is a surefire way to guarantee that their husband will never cheat on them, and that is to marry the biggest loser that they can find so that nobody else would want him.  But obviously no woman would want to do that.

There is an additional complication in the matter.  Humans are naturally polygynous; humans have been mildly polygynous throughout evolutionary history.  So it is natural for resourceful men of high status to mate with multiple women simultaneously.  (But recall the dangers of naturalistic fallacy.  Natural means neither good nor desirable.  It just means is; it does not mean ought.)  So polygyny ­– marriage of one man to more than one woman – is a deeply embedded part of male and female human nature.  Men have always had multiple wives, and women have always been married to men who have had other wives.

It is true that, even under polygyny, many men still only have one wife while other men remain completely mateless.  But we are disproportionately descended from polygynous men, because polygynous men invariably have more children than monogamous men.  So most of us are descended from polygynous men (and, disproportionately, from highly successful polygynous men with a large number of wives), only a few of us are descended from monogamous men, and none of us are descended from mateless men.  So polygyny remains a significant part of human nature.

Such is the dilemma faced by women, especially highly desirable women who are more likely to marry highly desirable men.  The more desirable the woman is, the more desirable her husband is likely to be, and the more likely he is to cheat on her.  The more likely her husband is to remain sexually faithful to her, the less desirable he is (and the greater the probability that perhaps she could have done much better than him).

Read the post here

Margaret Sonser Breen has a new published work

Narratives of queer desire : deserts of the heart Book Description An interdisciplinary project that uses literary analysis, along with personal testimony and the applications of gender theory, as a means for identifying and exploring LGBTQ stories, the book considers queer yearnings for stories other than those conventionally available, that engage and resist norms in literature as well as culture and politics.

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Our copy is on order and will be available soon.

Recently linked in Siyanda, new thoughts from a group of researchers on how women can truly become empowered in our world — “a system where the well-being of people is the goal and commodity production the means – rather than vice versa.”

Here’s the short summary:

In 2006 the World Bank coined the slogan ‘Gender equality is smart economics’. The argument was that pushing women into paid employment or making it easier for them to establish a business leads to reduced poverty and faster growth.

But what has tended to get overlooked in this approach are the gender inequalities associated with the unpaid work of household maintenance and sustenance of society on which the market economy depends. This ‘Agenda for Change’ proposes an alternative vision; one in which the economy is shaped for people rather than people for the economy. In other words, it argues for a system where the well-being of people is the goal and commodity production the means – rather than vice versa.

Central to this is the question: what would a gender-equitable economic system look like?

For one, the inter-dependency of unpaid domestic and caring labour and market employment would be recognised, and unpaid labour in the home and in communities would be valued as much as earning an income through the market. Firms would not discriminate against employees on the basis of their domestic and care responsibilities. The public sector would play a greater role in investing in infrastructure and services to reduce and redistribute burdens of unpaid care work. And work of any kind would be equally shared between women and men, and be organised to support and nourish rather than oppress and exploit. The current financial crisis has given the State an important role in securing people’s material wellbeing; now is a pivotal moment of opportunity for creating a fairer world.

Title:    Women’s Empowerment Needs a People-Centred Economy
Author:   Fontana, M., with Eyben, R.
Publication Date:  March 2009
Publisher:  The Institute of Development Studies
Donor:  The UK Department for International Development (DFID), with additional funding from he Norwegian and Swedish Ministries of Foreign Affairs, and UNIFEM

From the publication, a chart created by UNIFEM.

UConn Metanoia 2009

For complete information: http://www.metanoia.uconn.edu/

Ireland’s Unbelievably Good Commercial for Marriage Equality (Gay Rights – Change.org)

The title says it all.

October 22-24, 2009: Human Rights in the USA Conference sponsored by the Human Rights Institute and UConn School of Law

The “Human Rights in the USA.” Conference at the University of Connecticut in Fall 2009 will evaluate how international human rights laws and norms are presently applied in the USA and will suggest recommendations for the future. It will focus on human rights litigation and recent legal innovation, and contextualize the law by examining the wider impact of human rights campaigns on gender violence, racism, poverty and health care. Significantly, it will seek to integrate the perspectives offered by disparate social movements and connect law, politics and social policy in ways that can provide greater scope for the realization of human rights.

In conjunction with the conference:

2009-2010 Human Rights Film Series: Human Rights in the USA

Sponsored by the Human Rights Institute and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center

Starting on September 8, here are the first few films in the series:

Tuesday, September 8, 2009
4:00 PM
Konover Auditorium
Thomas J. Dodd Research Center

Film: Living Broke in Boom Times: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty (2008)

Followed by a Q & A and reception with filmmaker Peter Kinoy and poverty rights activist Willie Baptist

“… a wonderful documentary, heart-rending in its depiction of homelessness and desperation, yet inspiring in what it shows about the magnificence of people fighting back, organizing, refusing to accept their situation, trying to build a national movement.” — Howard Zinn, Professor and author of A People’s History of the United States

>>Check the website for time and place for the following:

Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Film: The Least of These (2009)

The Least of These explores one of the most controversial aspects of American immigration policy: family detention. As part of the Bush administration policy opened a former prison turned immigration facility to house children and their parents from all over the world who are awaiting asylum hearings or deportation proceedings. The film explores the government rationale for family detention, conditions at the facility, collateral damage, and the role (and limits) of community activism in bringing change, while demonstrating how core American rights and values – due process, presumption of innocence, upholding the family structure as the basic unit of civil society, and America as a refuge of last resort – are currently being denied to immigrants, and particularly children.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Film: Ask Not (2008)

This documentary examines the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” military policy which was resulted in the dishonorable discharge of gay and lesbian members of the armed forces. The film portrays the personal stories of Americans willing to risk their lives for a country that criminalizes the act of coming out. Current and veteran gay soldiers reveal how “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” affects them during their tours of duty, as they struggle to maintain a double life.

This video and report are from 2004. Coming soon will be an update to this topic. –Kathy

FRONTLINE/World . Video | PBS

Mumbai

In the heart of Mumbai, India [also known as Bombay] lies Kamathipura, one of the country’s poorest districts and also its largest red light district, home to more than 60,000 sex workers. In the spring of 2004, FRONTLINE/World correspondent Raney Aronson traveled to Kamathipura to investigate what has quickly become the center of the AIDS epidemic in India, which affects more than four and a half million people.

On the streets of Kamathipura, it’s no challenge for Aronson to find sex workers to talk with. In a small gathering she asks them frankly about the core issues of their trade — economics and health. The women get the equivalent of US$1.50 for sex, $2 on a good night, less than a dollar on a bad night. To have sex without a condom, men will often pay more or, after a few visits, tell the women they love them. The women in the group laugh a bit about the men’s proclamations of love, but there’s a tragic fact behind their laughter: more than half of the sex workers here are HIV positive.

For the pimps and brothel owners of Mumbai, the sex industry is a multi-million dollar business in which money, not health, is the bottom line. The highest prices go for the youngest girls, many of whom have been kidnapped from other countries and trafficked to India, or sold by their own families into the industry.

Aronson travels to the Sanlaap Shelter, where she meets a group of girls who have been rescued from prostitution. The girls tell their stories — fathers and uncles who sold them, madams who held them hostage. None of them was told about the dangers of HIV. They found out only upon arriving at the shelter, and now it’s too late. Many of them are already HIV positive.

Aronson meets Anju Pawar, a social worker with the ASHA project, dedicated to educating women about AIDS. ASHA is made up of sex workers who go into the brothels as peer educators to talk to the women about safe sex. The work is frequently frustrating. Anju says that the brothel keepers often keep new girls from peer educators for their first few months.

Soliciting for sex is illegal in India, but as Aronson surveys Kamathipura, she sees that the police are often part of the problem. Prostitutes tell Aronson that when arrested, they’re forced to either have sex or pay bribes for their release. And the youngest girls are the most vulnerable.

Not surprisingly, Mumbai’s AIDS rate has soared in recent years. Aronson visits one of Mumbai’s largest public hospitals, one of the few in India that doesn’t turn away AIDS patients. There she finds a man who is well into his sickness. This man is a migrant worker who’s come to Mumbai to make money, contracted AIDS from a sex worker and has likely taken it back to his home community. The man is married, but his wife is far away, at home. The doctors have no way of contacting or treating the wife. Health experts estimate that one-fifth of all AIDS cases in India are married women who have been infected by their husbands.

More than a thousand miles east of Mumbai, along the banks of the Ganges, India’s holiest river, things are different in the city of Kolkata [Calcutta]. Notoriously poor and overpopulated, Kolkata would seem especially vulnerable to infectious diseases, but the red light district there has the lowest AIDS rate of any in the country.

This is due to the efforts of people like Putul Singh, who was sold into prostitution by her husband eight years ago at the age of 20. She now works full-time for the Sonagachi Project, the model AIDS prevention group in the country. As Aronson follows Putul on her rounds through Kolkata talking to sex workers, Putul talks about Sonagachi’s strategy for combating AIDS. Offering basic health care, she says, is the best way to open the discussion about safe sex.

When Putul talks to women she is extremely frank about requiring men to use condoms. As she tells one woman, “[You] must say ‘Look – you have a family at home and so do I. If we don’t use a condom our families will be ruined.’ You have to look at the big picture.”

The Sonagachi Project works with men as well as women to explain the necessity of condoms. Aronson attends a meeting of some of the area’s pimps and regular clients, locally called babus. Listening to Putul’s arguments with one man, who insists that he is disease-free and at the same time refuses to accept that condoms will do anything for him, it’s clear she faces an uphill battle.

Another group meeting, of the sex workers’ union in Kolkata, is more encouraging. Even though prostitution is also illegal in Kolkata, the union is recognized by the state of West Bengal, which has been run by a communist government for 25 years. Union president Rama Debnath explains to union members that when they’re confronted by the police, they need to stand up to them and have courage. “What’s your rank? Where’s the charge?” she tells them to ask.

It turns out that the combination of the sex workers’ union and the Sonagachi Project is making a difference. Condom use has soared in Kolkata, from an estimated three percent to 90 percent. Kolkata’s AIDS rate is one fifth that of Mumbai’s.

But even in Kolkata, a monumental challenge still remains: reaching the thousands of young girls sold into the sex trade. Rama says one way to do it is to legalize prostitution, so there would be regulations. “In the same way other industries don’t employ children,” she says, “This industry wouldn’t employ children either.”

Aronson asks the girls back at the Sanlaap Shelter if they’ve heard of the sex workers’ union. “Nobody came to talk to us,” one girl says. “The only people who came were the police to raid the brothels.”

Although haunted by their memories, the Sanlaap girls are at least now far from the red-light districts from which they were rescued. Most of their families won’t take them back after they’ve worked as prostitutes, but Sanlaap attempts to give them hope for some sort of a future. But these girls are the fortunate ones. Thousands of other young girls are left behind. And what happens to them in many ways will determine the future of AIDS in India.

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Cell phone statistics reported by Jason Griffey, July 12, 2009, and posted on The Shifted Librarian

• numbers (because this arena is very important for us)
  4,100,000,000 number of mobile phone subscriptions in the world
• over 60% of the people on earth have a mobile phone subscription service
• in 50 different countries around the world, the number of cellphones per person exceeds 100%  (means more than one cellphone each)  not just places like Korea, but places like Gambia, where 1,000,000 people have access to a telephone, and only 50,000 of those are fixed landlines
• 90% of the world’s population will have access to a cell phone signal by the end of 2010
• 2,400,000,000 people using SMS (active users)
  75% of the people who have data access on their phones
• we’re not good at handling numbers, but 1,200,000 people use email, so twice as many using text messages
• 2.3 trillion text messages sent in 2008
  20% growth curve over 2007

These numbers are astounding — AND they have more implications than most of us would ever imagine. But what do cell phones and SMS have to do with genocide and human rights? Please read on.

Valerie Love, UConn Libraries Human Rights specialist, pointed me to a site of great worth: enough! The project to end genocide and crimes against humanity.

From their About page, they say:

Genocide and war crimes are not inevitable, and we at Enough want to create noise and action both to stop ongoing atrocities and to prevent their recurrence. Our mission is to help people from every walk of life understand the practical actions they can take to make a difference. Our strategy is to energize diverse communities – including students, religious groups, activists, business leaders, celebrities, and Diaspora networks – to ensure that their voices are heard on some of the most pressing foreign policy and moral challenges facing the world today.

Enough! gathers media together on human rights violations and the effects. Here is a report from CNN on the “Conflict Minerals” found in Congo which empower the militia and military groups, the source of violence against women and girls and much suffering in the region:

Besides informing us of human rights violations which we may be encouraging unknowingly, they give direct instruction to actions which we can take.

CAN YOU HEAR CONGO NOW? CELL PHONES, CONFLICT MINERALS, AND THE WORST SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD (which I have also added to the Readings page on this blog), provides background and current understanding.  Our choices for cell phones and companies have far reaching implications and we need to be aware! Below, find their guide to action from their report on “Conflict Minerals” in the Congo:

How to Make an Impact

The crisis in eastern Congo is fueled by conflict minerals, but we can stop the deadly cycle by using our power as activists and consumers.

1. Join the Movement at www.raisehopeforcongo.org
2. Text “CONGOPLEDGE” (one word, no spaces) to ACTION (228466) or visit www.raisehopeforcongo.org/special-page/conflict-minerals to endorse the Conflict Minerals Pledge.
3. Send emails to the industry leaders and ask them to be a leader on this issue by signing the pledge. Visit www.raisehopeforcongo.org/special-page/conflict-minerals to send your emails now.
4. Call the White House switchboard at 202.456.1414 or write to President Obama at www.whitehouse.gov and ask him to appoint a special envoy for the Great Lakes region.

More reports, audio, and contacts are at this relatively new site — started only in 2006. Thank you to Valerie Love, once again, for giving me this link. It’s a small world and if there is anything we can do to stop these horrific actions by changing our purchasing behavior and being knowledgeable of our sources, we have the power.

Valerie has her own blog: Human Rights Research Blog