Tag: Women

A Win For Women (Finally)

The House voted on Friday to give women powerful new tools to challenge sex discrimination by employers who pay women less than men for the same or substantially similar work.

The House passed two related bills on Friday. One, approved 247 to 171, would give workers more time to file lawsuits claiming job discrimination.

The bill would overturn a 2007 decision by the Supreme Court that enforced a strict 180-day deadline, thwarting a lawsuit by Lilly M. Ledbetter, a longtime supervisor at the Goodyear tire plant in Gadsden, Ala. Three Republicans voted for the bill.

The other bill — passed 256 to 163, with support from 10 Republicans — would make it easier for women to prove violations of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which generally requires equal pay for equal work.

In the Ledbetter case, a jury found that Goodyear had paid her less than men, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, threw out her complaint. It said she should have filed her claim within 180 days of “the alleged unlawful employment practice,” the initial decision to pay her less than men performing similar work.

“The Ledbetter decision is unacceptable and must not stand,” said Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor. Under the decision, Mr. Miller said, employers can get away with years of pay discrimination “if they hide it for the first 180 days.”

The bill would relax the statute of limitations, making clear that each new paycheck violates the law if it results “in whole or in part” from a discriminatory pay decision made in the past.

Under the 1963 law, an employer can justify paying women less than men if it shows that the disparity is based on any factor other than sex. Employers have successfully used this defense in many cases, arguing that unequal pay was justified by the education, training or experience of male employees.

Some courts have also held that a company can legally pay men more than women because of “market forces” or the higher salaries that men received in previous jobs. Democrats said those factors — market forces and prior salaries — were themselves sometimes tainted by discrimination.

The bill would make it harder for employers to use such defenses. Employers would have to show that the pay disparity was based on “a bona fide factor” other than sex, and that the factor was “consistent with business necessity.”

The bill would also allow women to obtain compensatory and punitive damages from employers who violated the equal pay law.

The White House said the bill would allow “unlimited compensatory and punitive damages, even when a disparity in pay was unintentional.” Under the new standard, it continued, “judges and juries would supplant the free market system” in determining wages.

A New Woman’s Movement?

The Boston Globe is reporting there is the beginnings of a new movement.

Clinton’s presidential bid galvanized women as no other campaign in recent history has. While many younger women supported Barack Obama, among Clinton’s most passionate supporters were older women who saw the former first lady as their best chance of having a woman in the White House in their lifetimes – and who saw the demise of her campaign as evidence of lingering sexism in America. In Denver this week, many of these women have been talking about the emergence of a new movement that would unite women across the generational divide to combat discrimination, unequal pay, and other concerns.

Several dozen of Clinton’s strongest female supporters met three weeks ago in New York to organize The New Agenda, a nonpartisan group focused on women’s issues and electing women candidates. Amy Siskind, a major Democratic donor and activist from New York who helped start it, said in a phone interview yesterday that she has received e-mails and calls of support from around the country.

But it is not at all clear a new movement would benefit the organizations that have long been at the forefront, such as EMILY’s List and NARAL. Now, they are calling for unity, saying that some of the most important women’s issues, especially abortion rights, are at stake in November and that Clinton supporters have a duty to stand up for them.Many Clinton loyalists, though, are angry with the leaders of the party and women’s groups, saying they did too little to confront rampant sexism and allowed an unfair primary process. They are divided over whether to support Obama or Republican John McCain – a troubling turn for the Democratic Party and for the feminist establishment, whose credibility depends on keeping Clinton supporters in the fold.

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!

Maybe You Will Not Go Blind

Yet, according to Martha Cornog, of “The Big Book of Masturbation”, self-pleasuring is surely the second most common human sex act. And, despite its torrid history, that’s proving to be a good thing. Turns out this once taboo behavior has plenty of health benefits and can do wonders for your sex life.

While the shackles of masturbation have been loosening around our loins, it is only recently that society has started to let go of its guilt around solo sex. This is in part thanks to sex researchers affirming that most of us do it, as well as the embracing of it by television sitcoms. Who can forget the bet made by Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer as to who could remain the “master of their domain” the longest?

Even if you’re not a conformist, there’s something about safety in numbers when it comes to this topic. (And if it makes you feel even better, know that masturbation is common among other animals, like dogs, cats, horses, bulls, rats, hamsters, deer, and whales, too).

Health Benefits for Men

Research summarized in a 2007 article in Sexual and Relationship Therapy found that masturbation may help men by:

— Improving his immune system’s functioning.

— Building his resistance to prostate gland infection.

— Making for a healthier prostate.

Australian researchers have reported that frequent masturbation may lower a man’s risk of developing prostate cancer. A survey of men found the more frequently a man masturbates between the ages of 20 and 50, the less likely they are to get prostate cancer. In fact, those who masturbated more than five times a week were one-third less likely to develop prostate cancer.

Health Benefits for Females

When it comes to a woman’s health, self-pleasuring serves her well by:

— Building her resistance to yeast infections.

— Combating pre-menstrual tension and other physical conditions associated with their menstrual cycles, like cramps.

— Relieving painful menstruation by increasing blood flow to the pelvic region. This will also reduce pelvic cramping and related backaches.

— Relieving chronic back pain and increasing her threshold for pain.

What are you waiting for….it is clean….safe…and healthy….stop reading and start jerking………

I Knew That Cucumbers Were Evil!

Besides the terrible killings inflicted by the fanatics on those who refuse to pledge allegiance to them, Al-Qa’eda has lost credibility for enforcing a series of rules imposing their way of thought on the most mundane aspects of everyday life.

They include a ban on women buying suggestively-shaped vegetables, according to one tribal leader in the western province of Anbar.

Sheikh Hameed al-Hayyes, a Sunni elder, told Reuters: “They even killed female goats because their private parts were not covered and their tails were pointed upward, which they said was haram.

“They regarded the cucumber as male and tomato as female. Women were not allowed to buy cucumbers, only men.”

Other farcical stipulations include an edict not to buy or sell ice-cream, because it did not exist in the time of the Prophet, while hair salons and shops selling cosmetics have also been bombed.

Viagra May Help Women

These types of stories just keep falling into my lap……and for some reason I cannot resist sharing them with my readers.

Recently in the WSJ, this info was published.

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that Pfizer Inc.’s erectile-dysfunction drug Viagra can reduce adverse sexual effects in women caused by antidepressant use.

Sales of Viagra, which haven’t grown for years, could get a boost if the findings result in a new market being opened for the drug, which first became available a decade ago.

The doctors who conducted the study, from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, estimate antidepressant treatment-associated sexual dysfunction occurs in 30% to 70% of people treated for major depression. The JAMA article said it is “believed no randomized controlled trial has demonstrated an effective treatment for women experiencing sexual dysfunction” from antidepressant drugs.

But researchers found that only 28% of women taking Viagra showed no improvement, as opposed to 73% of women taking a placebo. The study showed no serious adverse effects.

The authors noted women experience major depressive disorder at nearly double the rate of men and also experience greater subsequent sexual dysfunction. They wrote that by treating the treatment-associated problem it can “reduce the current high rates of premature medication discontinuation and improve depression disease management.”

Women Switch To Obama

I realize that this may not be the best post for some to read, but it happens.

Marilyn Authenreith, a mother of two in North Carolina, felt strongly about supporting Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary.

But once the former first lady quit the race, Authenreith switched allegiance to Barack Obama, mainly because she thinks that he — unlike Republican John McCain — will push for universal healthcare.

Now that the Democratic marathon is over, Clinton supporters like Authenreith are siding heavily with Obama over McCain, polls show. And Obama has taken a wide lead among female voters, belying months of political chatter and polls of primary voters suggesting that disappointment over Clinton’s defeat might block the Illinois senator from enjoying his party’s historic edge among women.

The rancor peaked two weeks ago with televised images of furious Clinton loyalists protesting a Democratic Party meeting in Washington to settle a dispute over Florida and Michigan delegates.

“There are women still struggling with a real sense of grief that Hillary is not the nominee,” said Maren Hesla, who runs campaign programs for EMILY’s List, a group that promotes female candidates who support abortion rights. But that sense “will grow smaller with every day that passes from the nomination battles.”
Aides suggested that McCain’s support for a gas tax holiday, a hawkish foreign policy and steps against climate change would appeal to many women.

But in a year that strongly favors Democrats, McCain faces an uphill battle to cut into Obama’s advantage among women, who made up more than half of the voters in recent presidential elections.

“Women are voting for Obama because they dislike [President] Bush, they dislike McCain, they dislike the war, and they’re upset about the economy, and those facts override any concerns about the Clinton-Obama primaries,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said.
In the days since Clinton abandoned the race and endorsed him, the political arm of Planned Parenthood and other women’s groups have rallied behind Obama and joined forces to attack McCain. Among other things, they have highlighted McCain’s opposition to abortion rights. The Republican’s moderate image, they say, has misled many women into thinking he supports abortion rights.
“Women see themselves as more economically vulnerable than men, more likely recipients of the social safety net at some point in their lives, and they see a larger role for government,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found a wide gap last week: Women favored Obama over McCain, 52% to 33%. The survey also found that voters who cast ballots for Clinton in the Democratic primaries preferred Obama over McCain, 61% to 19%.

I had asked several times, why women would vote for McCain after Clinton suspended her campaign.  Most of the trash I received had not to do with why they would switch just that most were pissed at the Clinton loss.  At least now I have a better grasp at what is going on with women voters.  But if one does not agree–I am listening.

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.

Can Obama Get The Clinton Women?

This has been a story for awhile now and not many have a good answer to the question.  Can Obama win over the Clinton women?  Or will they truly vote for McCain?

Barack Obama at last has won the endorsement of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the woman who came closer to the Democratic presidential nomination than any other. Now he has to win over her millions of female supporters.

Women have been sent to “the back of the bus” again, says Mary Jane Coughlin, 46, a Long Island copywriter who says she will write in Clinton’s name in November rather than vote for Obama. “We work twice as hard to get half as far.

Obama has said he will stress the differences between himself and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, especially on issues such as health care, judicial appointments and abortion rights. Obama campaign spokeswoman Linda Douglass says female voters will respond to Obama’s life in a “female-centric” family, as he discusses the influences of his mother, grandmother, wife and mother-in-law. The gender gap in the primaries wasn’t anti-Obama, she says, but pro-Clinton. “I don’t think it was about him, it was about her.”

Groups such as NARAL Pro-Choice America, which endorsed the Illinois senator last month, will also help. The abortion-rights group plans to spend $10 million in the presidential and congressional elections this year, said president Nancy Keenan. It also will target independent and GOP women who favor abortion rights, particularly suburban ones in Pennsylvania and other swing states.

Clinton consistently won the votes of women during the primaries. Women 65 and older were strongest in their support: She won them by an average of 24 percentage points in contests where voters were surveyed as they left polling places.

In her farewell remarks Saturday, Clinton urged her supporters to back Obama, but acknowledged that their desire to elect a woman will have to wait. “We have to work together for what still can be. And that is why I will work my heart out to make sure that Sen. Obama is our next president,” Clinton said.

Obama could face a challenge to win over some women who, in Clinton’s loss, feel they’ve been disrespected by the Democratic Party and are stinging over what they believe was sexism in cable news coverage of her campaign.

Now that the primaries are over and the presumptive candidate has been chosen will the women that were the dir hard supporters actually come to the rescue of the Obama candidacy?  Your thoughts?

Will Women Support Obama?

I have asked this question before and still do not have a good handle on the answer.  Do women have an obligation to support a serious woman candidate? Or is gender now simply an interesting but ultimately irrelevant consideration?

The Grrrl Power position was staked out early on by Emily’s List. Less than one hour after Clinton announced her candidacy in January 2007, the group issued an endorsement statement from president Ellen Malcolm. “I am one of the millions of women who have waited all their lives to see the first woman sworn in as President of the United States,” wrote Malcolm. “And now we have our best opportunity to see that dream fulfilled.” Of course, given that Emily’s List exists for the express purpose of electing women, it’s no surprise that Malcolm would so quickly embrace Clinton, a candidate so strong she was hailed as the frontrunner from the moment she entered the race.

But Malcolm and others have upped the ante, declaring that Clinton’s candidacy not only compels their personal support, but also that of all feminists. After Clinton’s disappointing showing in the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, Malcolm even wrote an op-ed declaring that Clinton herself had a “responsibility” to stay in the race. She owed it to all women to prove that she wasn’t a quitter. The sentiment echoed Clinton’s own comments on the stump, her declaration that “I am not a quitter. I do not give up.”

But OBama’s support among women will probably be a long generational divide–younger more educated women will probably support Obama and older women will most likely switch to McCain.

But beyond that, to support a candidate because of gender and/or race is just plain dumb…what about issues?  Obama’s issues and stands are so similar to Clinton’s did little difference can be found between the two.  I feel that to not support a candidate because of gender is just as moronic as supporting one because of race.

Maybe the voter should evaluate the candidates on their stands and not one their plumbing.