Category — Miscellaneous

Here’s a great article about $1 million Opus Prize winner Aicha Ech Channa, founder of the Association for Women’s Solidarity in Casablanca, Morocco, to help unwed mothers become self-sufficient. She is the first Muslim to win the Opus award, an annual humanitarian award which goes to “unsung heroes for their faith-based acts of compassion….”

In the 1980s, she was working for the Moroccan Ministry of Social Affairs, where unwed mothers came seeking help, even though little help was available. Under [local] law, the women were considered prostitutes, and many had their babies taken away over their objections.

Considering that unacceptable, Ech Channa launched her program in 1985. It offers women legal counseling, job training and medical and psychological support with a goal of making them self-sufficient so they can raise their children….

Despite criticism from Muslim clerics, she is committed to her faith, which she approaches from a humanist standpoint.

Humanism is about individuals and the love they have for one another,” she said. “Every human being has a flame [of love] inside them that must be fanned.”

Found this article via Muslimah Media Watch, a terrific blog worth checking out further….

I’m re-posting this entry because Ms. Martin followed up with some terrific responses she got from a host of men’s groups.  Check out the second part here.

And the original post:

Courtney Martin of the American Prospect writes about a new generation of men rejecting “traditional and toxic notions of masculinity…but they’re still figuring out what should replace it.”

While it’s thrilling that there is also a movement of young men all who want to tear down the patriarchy right alongside women, it’s dangerous that they don’t have a clear picture of what they want to build in its place. At the conference, one young man spoke up against the notion of a new “feminist masculinity,” explaining that he feared it would be one more box that young men felt they had to fit into. There’s a lot of validity to his argument, but I fear that the old adage is true: We can’t be what we can’t see. Models help us try on various identities and find one that is truly authentic. The more publicly feminist-aligned men we have, the more opportunities the next generation has to find a positive, masculine gender identity that actually fits.

Continues at What’s the Alternative to Tucker Max? | The American Prospect.

From “No, Not You”

1. Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.

2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!

3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!

4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.

5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!

6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.

7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.

8. Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.

9. Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!

10. Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone “on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can blow it if you do.

And, ALWAYS REMEMBER: if you didn’t ask permission and then respect the answer the first time, you are committing a crime- no matter how “into it” others appear to be.

Here’s another version

For those of you who make scheduled fee payments:

You MUST PAY by the deadline on your account. The Bursar’s Office will be dropping students for non-payment of the September 17th deadline.  If you don’t make your payment, you will be dropped from all of your classes for the rest of the year.

I’ve seen too much in sports to be outraged by Serena Williams‘ outburst at the U.S. Open last weekend. I’ve seen world class athletes head-butt opponents, spit in the face of umpires, fire lethal serves at linespeople, tackle aging bench coaches.

I’ve seen it all. But rarely from a woman.

Which is why I can’t help but think that the outrage unleashed toward Williams in the past two days has something to do with her gender. She’s playing the sport of frilly underpants and dangly earrings, yet she came off last weekend as unhinged as Mike Tyson.

And Michael Kimmel wrote in Huffington Post

Ask yourself this: would the line judge have felt so threatened had she been yelled at by perky, pretty little Melanie Oudin, all 5 foot 6 of her bouncy teenage self?

How about a white man? White men can express anger and outrage — indeed, they’re supposed to. It’s one of the few emotional men are allowed to express — and we express it often, and often without penalty. And sometimes we go even further. Don’t get mad, the saying goes, get even.

Read more

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-kimmel/double-fault-serenass-los_b_285039.html

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

“A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson.

By MAUREEN DOWD

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opinion/13dowd.html?em

The SJSU Women’s Resource Center will be showing, Dream Girls, a film by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams, 6:00-8:00PM on Wednesday, 09/09/09. Please join us!

As with many of you, out there in the blogosphere, I am really feeling the start of the new academic year. This time around, however, I am overcome with sadness and frustration as over the last 10 days I have have to turn away at least 100 students from my classes.  My heart is breaking for those who are struggling to obtain something to which they are entitled, an education.

One thing that I don’t really hear being talked about a lot in relation to all this budget crisis hoopla is the California Master Plan for Higher Education. For all those out there who don’t really know about the Master plan, I think its really important because it is something that has historically really defined California and made California such a great place to live. Here’s the thing, the Master Plan (created in 1960) was based on the principle of universal access and choice for education and was a product of a belief in education opportunity for Californians. It was a commitment to the idea of tuition-free education to residents of the state.

What we are currently seeing in the state of our State and our daily experiences in dealing with caps on enrollment, furloughs, students struggling to get classes and so on isn’t just about short term cost saving measures. It seems to me, it is also about dimantling an ideology that says everyone has a right to an education and it is the responsibility of the state to uphold access to that right.  And quite frankly, that is what really pisses me off about this whole thing.

Anyway, here is a really great site about the Master Plan. http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/aboutuc/masterplan.html.  Maybe I should send this link to the CSU chancellor, board, and the governor. It seems like they may be suffering from selective memory.

A fascinating new study by Agnes Kovacs and Jacques Mehler offers further  evidence that bilingualism enhances cognitive control in children. Despite popular myths about the need to teach “one language first”, a growing literature shows that bilingualism actually improves a child’s long-term language development.

The study authors tested the ability of 7-month-old pre-lingual babies to modify “a previously learned response and found that those raised in a bilingual home were able to do this, whereas babies from a monolingual home were not.

Dozens of babies learned that when they heard certain nonsense words, a puppet would always appear on the same side of a screen. All the babies – whether from monolingual or bilingual homes – soon learned to anticipate the appearance of the puppet, and shifted their eyes promptly to the appropriate side of the screen.

During the second phase of the experiment, the location of the puppet moved to the other side of the screen. Crucially, the babies from bilingual homes managed to learn to anticipate the new location, but the babies with monolingual parents did not – they were stuck on the previously learned response. The bilingual babies, by contrast, appeared to have the cognitive control needed to inhibit the previous response.

This difference between the two groups of babies persisted even when the task was made easier by using different nonsense words for when the puppet changed location, and it also persisted when visual stimuli, rather than spoken words, were used to cue puppet appearance.

The researchers said their findings suggested there’s an early mental benefit of being raised in a bilingual environment – one that’s apparent even before a baby can utter any words of their own. “Just processing two languages and having to deal with the representations of each of them is sufficient for enhancing cognitive control,” the researchers said.

Full story at BPS Research Digest

Original research article here