NEWSFEMINISM

In these modern times, athletes are considered heroes and icons to thousands, sometimes millions, of people. Even compared to the idols we make of celebrities and musicians, athletes remain our anointed heroes. They often come with backstories that are the stuff of movies (sometimes literally) with tales of overcoming poverty, racism, broken homes, and a variety of other hard knocks. And most of all, athletes remind us of the human potential. They show us the human form in perfection. They dazzle us with their almost superhuman abilities. And it’s thrilling drama.

These characteristics make athletes intoxicating heroes. And that’s why they must be held accountable when they stumble or fall. They must be made an example of, because they represent what we wish we could be on our best of days.

We’ve such failings play out in almost every major sport:

• Football star Michael Vick‘s animal abuse.
• Basketball star Kobe Bryant’s recent hate speech directed at a ref.
• Baseball’s Mel Hall is currently serving a sentence of 45 years for rape and sexual assault.
• In fact, see a list of crimes by pro athletes across multiple sports here.

In huge professional sports clubs like the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, of course there will be a few bad apples or bad scenarios from time to time. What matters is how those events are handled. And whether it’s because of a sense of right and wrong or merely a glance at the bottom line, major sports franchises, players, and organizations are looking at the issues of hate speech, sexual assault, and even bullying with a critical eye.

Everyone is familiar with radio station contests. You know, the kind where if you are caller number 100, you are entered into a drawing to win concert tickets, backstage passes, and weekend getaways. An Edmonton station is taking this promotional standard to an unbelievable new low in its Win a Wife contest. Yes, you read that right: win a wife.

The Bear 100.3 FM is calling for male listeners to submit an application (which poses  soul-baring questions like "What do you have to offer a smokin hot foreign girl?" and asks men to name the "Stupidest thing you've done in the hopes of scorin"). From the pool of applicants, the station will select five finalists to compete for the grand prize of an all-expenses paid trip to Russia. The contest is sponsored by A Volga Girl, an American company that bills itself as an "integrity-based" agency that helps American and Canadian men find Russian women "who have expressed a sincere desire to find emotional stability."

Applications are posted on the station's website. A quick perusal of the current top-rated men in the contest reveals that many of them consider good food, a clean house, and frequent, casual sex to be in their top three reasons for wanting a Russian bride. In other words, they want a maid that they think has to sleep with them.

With 750 million users worldwide, Facebook is the second-most popular internet site. While most of those people use the site to do things like reconnect with long lost high school friends, share interesting cat videos, and post dinner plans, others use the social networking site to promote hatred and violence against women. Despite being in clear violation of Facebook's own Statements of Rights and Responsibilities, the site currently hosts pages like "Riding your Girlfriend softly, cause you dont want to wake her up," "Punching Pregnant Women in the Stomach," and "Kicking sluts in the Vagina."

Change.org member John Raines was sickened by what he saw. "I have several family members who have been the victim of sexual abuse and even rape," Raines said,  "I have seen the physical and mental scars of sexual violence. Yet, Facebook continues to allow pages full of harassment, hate speech, threats of violence, the plotting and encouragement of sexual violence and even murder to go unchecked." Because these pages went against, not only his own moral code, but Facebook's own stated policies, Raines started a petition to remind Facebook of its obligation to remove these pages.

Indeed, it could not be clearer that these pages are in clear violation of Facebook's Terms of service. Prohibited content includes that which is “hateful, threatening,” or contains “graphic or gratuitous violence” (Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, Section 3, item 7). Moreover, users are specifically barred from posting content that aims to “bully, intimidate, or harass” any user.

Raines wants Facebook to start enforcing these rules. That includes immediately removing these sexually violent pages once they have been reported. He also wants the company to issue an official statement condemning these pages and then add specific language to the Statement of Rights and responsibilities that makes it clear that pages promoting any form of sexual violence will be banned.

"A friend once told me there is a big difference in free speech and hate speech," said Raines, "Hate speech is never free.  It comes at a heavy price for its victims." Sign the petition and demand that Facebook take a stronger stand in enforcing its own policies and stop promoting rape and rape culture.

Photo: Sean MacEntee

Sexualizing women in skimpy clothes is a typical clothing advertising ploy, but Zappos.com’s new ad campaign is drawing fire for zooming straight ahead and skipping the skimpy clothes.

The new ad campaign for the online shopping giant portrays models -- all female -- going about their daily activities in the buff. Naked lady hailing a cab, naked jogger, naked model riding a scooter: all wear only shoes and a banner over their private parts that features the campaign’s slogan, "More than shoes!" In each, creepy blurry men oggle the women from the fringes of the photos.

It’s clear what the product is in these ads -- and, as the tag line admits, it’s not the shoes. MissRepresentation.org, the online outgrowth of the Sundance award-winning film of the same name that spotlights media objectification of women, has started a Change.org petition calling on Zappos to discontinue their ad campaign on the basis that it sends a litany of bad messages to men and women alike.

Last night, MSNBC announced that “The Ed Show” host Ed Schultz would be suspended for a week without pay for calling radio host Laura Ingraham a “right wing slut.” The decision came after almost 500 Change.org members signed a petition started by the Women’s Media Center calling on the network to hold Schultz accountable for his sexist statement.

In announcing their decision to suspend the talk show host, MSNBC said, “remarks of this nature are unacceptable and will not be tolerated.” Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center, announced that MSNBC and Schultz have also offered to meet with her organization to discuss how to make sure his inappropriate and degrading language will not be used again.

Schultz apologized on air Wednesday before handing his show over to Thomas Roberts for the duration of his suspension. He called his comments “vile and inappropriate” before offering apologies to Ingraham as well as his wife and children. While only time will tell, it seems Schultz may have learned to stick to the facts when debating an opponent rather than resorting to sexist slurs. “To the staff here at MSNBC, I apologize for embarrassing the company and the only way that I can really make restitution for you is to give you a guarantee, and the only way that I can prove my sincerity in all of this is if I never use those words again. Tonight, you have my word that I won't,” Schultz said.

When International Women’s Day was celebrated for the first time in 1911, women could cast ballots in only a handful of nations and not a single country had elected a female head of state. Birth control was universally illegal, with few exceptions. While Marie Curie had won her Nobel Prize a few years earlier, women across the world were prohibited from entering universities or, if they did graduate, were denied the right to practice their profession.

What a world of difference a hundred years makes. Thanks to social change actions and actors, women in many parts of the world can vote as well as run for office and win or lose based on merit, an important distinction. Women are doctors, lawyers, inventors, scientists, and engineers at the top of their fields. It’s a remarkable testament to the combined power of empathy, education, and activist elbow grease that so much has been won for women during just one century.

But, as far as we’ve come, the battle for full equality for all women and men is far from over. In honor of International Women’s Day, we’re highlighting actions across the site that have the potential to be just as revolutionary for women and girls as those campaigns waged by the generations before us (just look for the logo!). Start by checking out the petitions below, launched by major nonprofit players in the fight for gender equity, and sign on to make modern day history. In a hundred years, someone will surely write, “it’s a tremendous testament to empathy, education, activist elbow grease, and the internet that so much has been won.”

When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia declared in a recent interview with the California Lawyer that the Constitution doesn't protect women against discrimination, I wasn't surprised. And neither were plenty of women's rights advocates. I mean, we've only been fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) for almost a 90 years now for exactly that reason.

I knew that, one day, some powerful person who could jeopardize women's equality was going to come out and say, well, constitutionally, sexism and discrimination is a-okay. That's why Kimberly Voss writes in Women's eNews that ERA supporters should give Scalia "a standing ovation right about now." Because the concerns that women's equality is not protected by the Constitution have regularly been pooh-poohed, undermining the ability of advocates to make progress on the addition of the Equal Rights Amendment. But though many court interpretations have applied the 14th Amendment's equal protections clause (created regarding race) to sex discrimination, we knew that it's just not clearly spelled out enough. Now, Scalia's remarks have proven the point.

And not just proven the point, but galvanized a fresh movement for the ratification of the ERA. On Wednesday, National Organization for Women (NOW) President Terry O'Neill, Feminist Majority President Eleanor Smeal, and other prominent women's rights advocates joined Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) in a press conference to express the vital need for the Equal Rights Amendment. "All modern Constitutions adopted since WWII have explicitly included provisions guaranteeing women equal rights," Smeal pointed out. But the United States remains a beacon of sexism.

To get us started on the right foot with 2011, let us remember the victories Change.org members helped achieve in 2010. It's an inspiration for the new year, to keep fighting the good fight on behalf of women's rights, and to remember the power of change.

1. Freedom for the Scott Sisters: Jamie and Gladys Scott were set free today. The two young African-American women had received the overly harsh and discriminatory sentence of life in prison for their role as accomplices to a robbery that netted $11 and physically hurt nobody — while the armed men who performed the actual hold-up got off with only a few years. Jamie developed severe kidney problems while in prison that immediately threatened her life and motivated the push to get her and her sister released after 16 years, a more than adequate sentence, with the Action Committee for Women in Prison mobilizing 10,000 signatures on Change.org. Gladys is donating one of her kidneys to save her sister's life.

2. 18-Year-Old Iranian Women's Rights Blogger Released: Navid Mohebbi kept a blog in which wrote in support of women's rights from time to time, an act that led to his imprisonment in Iran. A Safe World for Women mobilized in defense of this young ally to gender justice, and after coverage from Change.org and other primarily non-mainstream media, Iran released Navid with a "suspended sentence" — a face-saving move in response to international outrage if I ever saw one.

3. NYPD to Fix Sex Crimes Reporting: Attempting to make their crime statistics look more palatable, New York police officers were misreporting rapes as minor misdemeanors, an action that might have allowed a serial rapist to go undiscovered for a longer time. After outrage from women's rights groups and a petition created by Change.org member Jaclyn Munson that garnered over 500 signatures, Amie Newman reported on Christmas Day that the NYPD announced it would be implementing six recommendations from a specially convened Sex Crimes Working Group to address its failures in dealing with sexual assault.

When I was growing up, my mom's friends always assumed I'd end up a lawyer. It makes sense that a smart girl with a passion for justice might choose to fight for equality through legal means; however, disillusionment with the criminal (in)justice system quickly set in when I learned that many women in prison for murder are there because they killed their abuser. The courts simply refuse to see long-term physical and emotional trauma at the hands of another person as a justification for self-defense. As I recently told my mom's boss, "You have to believe the system works in order to fight within it, and I believe our system is broken beyond repair."

Filmmaker Olivia Klaus doesn't share my cynicism. But she does share my passion to advocate for systemic change. Her film Sin by Silence documents the stories of several women imprisoned in the California Institution for Women who participate in Convicted Women Against Abuse (CWAA), a group "created in 1989 to help women inside prison break the silence about abuse and learn more about what they need to do to help others stop the cycle of violence." I spoke with Klaus about the impact her film is having on the rights of these imprisoned women.

How did you come to make this film?

When I started this journey, I never intended to make a film. I intended to help a friend who had finally opened up about what was happening in her marriage. Until then, domestic violence was a problem that happened to other people. My mind started racing for ways to fix things, yet I realized I was completely helpless. I had no answers and no solutions, but knew I had to do something!

What started as a journey to help a friend transformed into an effort to help many. I learned about CWAA from my colleague Elizabeth Leonard, author of Convicted Survivors, and I learned more from the women of CWAA than any textbook could teach me. They are the real experts on the issues of abusive relationships; they lived, breathed, and survived violence. And what better way to reach people's hearts and minds than through the power of film?!

Your film mentions the link between the violence these women experienced at the hands of their abusers and the violence inflicted upon them by the state through incarceration. Can you talk about how the two are connected?

The women in Sin by Silence replaced the prison of their abusive relationship with an actual prison of incarceration. It has been estimated that up to 80% of female prisoners have suffered from some form of abuse prior to incarceration. These women experienced abuse in their childhood, dating relationships, and on through their marriage; now they continue to be abused by an unjust system.

It's Black Friday, which means that people around the country are scrambling to jump-start their holiday shopping by taking advantage of the sales, sales, sales. Or, you could shop online, the feminist way. Here are just a few suggestions, courtesy of Change.org's Women's Rights Cause. Doesn't it make you feel all warm and gooey inside to know that you can spread around your holiday dough for great gifts that support women's rights? And you can do it in your PJs.

• Global Girlfriend offers women-made, fair-trade, eco-friendly, totally awesome items for sale, and donates 5-30% of each purchase toward microfinance grants for rural women in Africa (powered by the Camfed Seed Money program). Almost every item identifies who and where it hails from: pick up a handcrafted Reflecting Change Scarf in lime, raspberry, or turquoise, and you can see yourself supporting the artisan women of Asha (Hope) Handicrafts in India. Global Girlfriend also offers "Gifts That Give More": donate straight to causes such as sending to Afghan girls to school or providing childbirth equipment for mothers-to-be in Haiti, Rwanda, Malawai, or Lesotho.

• The Feminist Majority Foundation's online store is dedicated to woman-friendly products, from feminist books and music (heart Ani DiFranco) to the Save Roe Memorial Pin you always wanted. And if you buy one of their woman-made collection of Afghan crafts, you know that 100% of the proceeds is going to aid women and girls in Afghanistan.

• Bead for Life offers a collection of fair trade necklaces, bracelets, and earrings as well as beautiful loose beads for your own crafty adventures — you can tell your friends you strung together their favorite new necklace, or make it an social gift with a Bead for Life jewelry-making party. The exquisite beads are made of recycled paper (score one for the environment) by women in Uganda working to support themselves and their families.