Tag: Gender

Can You Be Too Atractive?

Recently I did a post and made fun of the Saudis because the “religious police” arrested a couple of men for being too handsome…their reasoning was that their looks would entice women too easily……I said then and stand by my statement that it is an absurdity that their is a crime of being too handsome……..

But wait!  what is the old saying?  “Whatever you can do, we can do it better”……….Iowa has proven this statement……Think Progress has brought this to light…..

Standing by a December decision, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled Friday that a male dentist who fired a female assistant because she was too attractive and threatened his marriage did not commit sex discrimination.

The all-male court ruled against Melissa Nelson, who sued her former employer James Knight, alleging Knight’s wife told Knight to fire Nelson because “she was a big threat to our marriage.” Knight fired Nelson in January 2010 after more than 10 years working for him, later testifying that she was not fired for performance reasons.

The Court wrote:

“It is abundantly clear that a woman does not lose the protection of our laws prohibiting sex discrimination just because her employer becomes sexually attracted to her, and the employer’s attraction then becomes the reason for terminating the woman once it, in some way, becomes a problem for the employer. If a woman is terminated based on stereotypes related to the characteristics of her gender, including attributes of attractiveness, the termination would amount to sex discrimination because the reason for termination would be motivated by the particular gender attribute at issue.”

Can you believe the bullsh*t?

Teacher Changes Sex

Some parents of children at a Vacaville, Calif., elementary school have complained that they were not notified before a teacher’s gender reassignment surgery.

The parents told the Travis Unified School District that they believe they had a right to know before the school year began that a Foxboro Elementary School music teacher, whose name was not released, underwent gender reassignment surgery during the summer break and now uses the honorific “Mister,” KCRA-TV, Sacramento, Calif., reported Thursday.

The school board said such disclosure would violate privacy rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Twenty-three students from 15 different families have been transferred out of the music class since the beginning of the school year.

Women Taking On The Trades

Non-traditional occupations, like auto service or auto repair, are those in which women comprise 25 percent or less of the total employment. According to Department of Labor statistics for 2006, only 1.6 percent of those working as automotive service technicians or mechanics were women. That’s 14,000 women compared to 861,000 men in that profession.

Brittany Johnson, a heating, ventilation and air-conditioning student at Platt Technical High School in Milford, said she always knew she wanted to do something a little bit different and, after going through the school’s exploratory program, said she loved the HVAC program.

She said she didn’t necessarily receive criticism from the boys but they did give her a little bit of a hard time. “It was more of the ‘boys will be boys’ type of criticism so I knew they were just kidding around.” Johnson said. “You shouldn’t worry about the boys; you should just do whatever shop you want to do.”Nancy Roman, a junior at Platt Tech, is in the culinary curriculum but took plumbing classes at the school.

“Some people didn’t think I would be able to do some of the things like plumbing but I got the highest grade,” Roman said. “The boys were surprised but not critical because they asked me for help.” There are many jobs and opportunities students are unaware of until they go through the exploratory program, said Debra Anderson, guidance coordinator for Emmett O’Brien.

These types of exploratory courses are usually the best way for girls to discover if they would like a non-traditional career. There are also summer intern programs like those run by Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. in Stratford.

She said the girls have to prove themselves and work harder than the boys, otherwise they will not get the respect they deserve. “You always have something to prove as a female, I’ve just come to accept it,” said Amiot, who will be spending the next year on a sabbatical, working to help certify four automotive programs at technical high schools in Connecticut.

This could be excellent news for the labor movement–women could become the majority in the movement–You Go Girls!

Hillary And The Future Of Other Women Candidates

I have been asking since May 31st of why the anger and hatred.  That I understand disappointment, but if they are truly Democrats why would they consider voting for a Repub that has nothing in common with their issues?  So far NO ONE has stepped forward to answer my questions, so I can only assume that there is NO good reason why they would vote for McCain.

With that off my chest, I found this article by Katha Politt of the Nation magazine.

Hillary Clinton came this close. In fact, as of this writing, she hasn’t formally conceded. Nobody really understands why: why she stuck it out this long, given the math, and why she gave such a grudging, graceless version of her stump speech after the South Dakota primary clinched the nomination for Barack Obama. Suggestions I’ve heard are not very flattering: she hopes to whittle down her multimillion-dollar campaign debt with donations from the deluded die-hards screaming Denver! Denver! She wants the number-two spot. She’s a crazy narcissistic rhymes-with-rich. Maybe she’s just ticked off because pundits have been trying to hustle her off the stage ever since her third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.

Some think Clinton’s loss, and the psychodrama surrounding it, will set women back. I think they’re wrong. Love her or loathe her, the big story here is Americans saw a woman who was a serious, popular, major-party candidate. Clinton showed herself to be tough, tireless, supersmart and definitely ready to lead on that famous Day One. She raised a ton of money and won 17.5 million votes from men and women. She was exciting, too: she and Obama galvanized voters for six long months — in some early contests, each of them racked up more votes than all the Republican candidates combined. Once the bitterness of the present moment has faded, that’s what people will remember. Because she normalized the concept of a woman running for President, she made it easier for women to run for every office, including the White House. That is one reason women and men of every party and candidate preference, and every ethnicity too, owe Hillary Clinton a standing ovation, even if they can’t stand her.

There’s another reason to be grateful to her. Clinton’s run has put to rest the myth that we are living in a postfeminist wonderland in which all that stands in women’s path is women themselves. Like a magnet — was it the pantsuit? — Clinton drew out the nation’s misogyny in all its jeering glory and put it where we could all get a good look at it. “Iron my shirt” hecklers. Wearers of Bros Over Hos T-shirts and buyers of Hillary nutcrackers. Fans of the Citizens United Not Timid website (check the acronym). Vats of sexist nastiness splattered across the Comments section of hundreds of blogs and websites. It’s as if every obscene phone caller and every exhibitionist in America decided to become an amateur political pundit.

As for the real pundits, thank you, Hillary, for showing us the snickering belittling of women that passes for media commentary: Rush Limbaugh, no Adonis, wondering out loud if “the country” was ready to watch a woman age in the White House; Chris Matthews, Don Imus and Tucker Carlson with their litany of insults — she-devil, Satan, witch, Antichrist, Lady Macbeth. NPR’s Ken Rudin compared her to Glenn Close’s indestructible bunny-boiler character in Fatal Attraction. And surely a special prize goes to Keith Olbermann for his indignant, hysterical bombast after Clinton’s ham-handed reference to RFK’s assassination. Rarely has men’s terror of women with more brains than a Bratz doll been on such public display. And, of course, men were what we mostly saw up there on the small screen, yakking and blathering away.

It wasn’t just men, though. Thank you, Hillary, for letting us get a good look at female sexism: the catty fashionistas and Style page dingbats obsessing over her clothes, her hair, her weight, her cleavage, her laugh. Air America’s Randi Rhodes calling her a “big fucking whore,” Maureen Dowd offering up her twice-weekly dose of vinegar and dozens of women writers musing prettily about why they and their friends all hate Hillary. Could it be they’re jealous? Not, as novelist Mary Gordon has suggested, of Hillary’s bagging of sexy Bill (yuck) but of her unsinkable ambition and drive. Hillary’s run upset the carefully balanced apple cart of trade-off and resignation and semi-suppressed frustration that is how women of the professional class accommodate to patriarchy lite.

Please note: I don’t claim Clinton lost because she’s a woman. (I think it was her Iraq vote, which she could never justify or renounce; assorted strategic mistakes; the bumptious interventions of her husband; and, most of all, that Barack Obama, a prodigiously gifted, charismatic politician, took the banner of change away from her.) The attacks on her may even have helped by making women voters identify with her. In New Hampshire, pols’ and pundits’ sexist mockery of her “misting” made women rally to her side and revitalized her campaign.

Now those women, not all white and not all working class, are on the political map, and so are the issues that made them identify with Clinton: the glass ceiling and the sticky floor, the inequality built into marriage and family life, sexual harassment and assault, lack of support for caring work — paid or unpaid — and, underlying them all, a fundamental lack of respect that over the years can make a woman feel fed up to here. It’s an irony of this campaign that Clinton was seen by the pundit class as a kind of über-diva whose attempts to reach out were transparently phony (beer and Canadian Club, anyone?) and yet millions of ordinary women–white, Latino and black–saw their struggles mirrored in hers. I won’t deny that there’s racism and xenophobia in the mix for some–hatred of Obama as affirmative action trickster and secret Muslim. It’s incredibly important for Clinton to do the right thing and rally these women to Obama, and I wish I felt surer that she would rise to the occasion.

She could begin by pointing out that Obama is pro-woman and prochoice and as President will pursue policies to benefit all women — on labor, healthcare, sexual violence and many other issues. She could tell her supporters a vote for McCain is crazy. She could even tell them that a biracial man in the White House will make it easier for voters to imagine other nontraditional kinds of Presidents — like the next woman who decides to run.

Whoever that woman is, though, she’d better have the hide of a rhinoceros.

A very interesting read and a bit long winded by all in all excellent piece.