Women's issues need to be integrated into mainstream news coverage of everything else

[the_future_modernes]

EDIT: Should note the use of "gender apartheid" here is rather problematic and psosibly appropriative.


Gender Apartheid Online:We will know a critical threshold has been reached when every magazine asks of every news story, "What does this mean for women and girls?"

Forty years ago, feminists demanded that special "women's pages," which featured fashion, society and cooking, be banished from newspapers. Instead, they insisted, newspapers should mainstream serious stories about the lives of women throughout their regular news.



Forty years later, the new media have re-segregated women's sections. The good news is that they are no longer about society, cooking and fashion. Most are tough, smart, incisive, analytic, and focus on events, trends or stories that the mainstream online news still ignores. The bad news is that they are not on the "front page" where men might learn about women's lives.



Does this trend signal success or failure? As an early activist in and scholar of the women's movement, I'm concerned that all we have gained after four decades are stand-alone feminist online magazines and web sites and the "right" to have separate women's sections embedded in other magazines. This is the women's pages of 1969 redux, even though these sections promote a broad array of serious subjects from a strong feminist perspective. Nor are all the editors of these online men who have cast women as "the other." Many are feminists who, for whatever reasons, have created these special women's sections.


Salon, for example, has Broadsheet, which produces excellent stories about issues or trends that affect half the population. Slate has Double XX, which recruits talented and thoughtful women to write stories that offer an important feminist perspective. PoliticsDaily.com has a "Woman Up" section that is a collective women's blog. OpenDemocracy, a British online magazine, has 50/50, a separate section that focuses on news stories about women around the world.(* There is also much to be said about exactly how diverse are the issues covered by these news magazines. A lot of them stick to middleclass, upper class white women stuff. Much more on poverty and reproductive rights WAY beyond abortion rights, trans issues, etc etc are needed. )


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Political Hell has broken loose in Puerto Rico

[the_future_modernes]

Political Chaos this afternon in Puerto Rico

Puerto Rican dramatist Roberto Ramos-Perea has just sent out this e-mail about events in Puerto Rico this afternoon. Twitter feeds and local television reports confirm the disturbances described here by Ramos-Perea. Here is his description of events followed by a video:
It is 5:00 of the evening of June 30, 2010, groups of students, teachers and citizens asked for entry to the House of the Laws and they were struck and tortured by the Police, there are numerous injured people, while the National Guard is mobilized towards the Capitol Hill. Violent shocks scatter for the whole zone of the Parliament and the repressions continue.

A constitutional coup has just been established in Puerto Rico.


After a year in which the present time government under the New Progressive Party (Partido Nuevo Progresista, that attempts to join the Island to the United States trough statehood) tried to and succeeded taking over many institutions that form the base of the democratic government of Puerto Rico, an atmosphere of hostility followed by many reckless actions that threaten public peace had climaxed in violent and aggressive actions of this government against the parties of the opposition, the organized student movement, the labor unions, the press, the environment, as against every area and institution of Puerto Rico’s civil society.

This constitutional coup springs from the Legislative branch of the government under the command of Senator Thomas Rivera Schatz, endorsed by the central government, under the dominance of the Secretary Governor, counselor Marcos Rodríguez Ema, with the obvious intent of having under their grasp and without opposition full control of every agency and organization that rule the judiciary, academic, economic and civil societies. Before this scenario, Governor Luis Fortuño operates without volition, has no opinion, appearance nor public responsibility.MORE