Feminists on the Money

It’s not every day I see a $50 bill. But last week an ATM spat one out at me. I was extremely surprised to see the following three things…

1. A representation of the statue of the Famous Five that can be seen on the Olympic Plaza in Calgary, Alberta, and on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The Famous Five are Emily Murphy, Nellie McClung, Irene Parlby, Henrietta Muir Edwards, and Louise McKinney. These women triumphed in the ‘Persons’ Case, one of the most famous cases in Canadian legal history.

2. In the bottom left corner of the back of the $50 note is a depiction of a newspaper headline that reads: “Women are Persons, Les femmes sont des personnes.” This journal tablet represents the newspaper headlines as they appeared on 18 October 1929, and is an enlargement of the newspaper held by Nellie McClung in the statue.

3. A picture of a medallion with the face of Thérèse Casgrain (1896-1981). Thérèse Casgrain from Montréal, is best known as the force behind various social reforms in Canada promoting justice and equality, and as the first woman to head a political party in Quebec (1951). In 1970, she was appointed to the Senate.

Has anybody noticed this before? It seems like a bit of a cheesy “Canadian Heritage” moment but at least its promoting awareness of the feminist struggles in Canadian history. Too bad its on such an inaccessible note.

Check out the Bank of Canada website to get a closer look.

We’re a little late on this, but we were thrilled to learn from Jessica Yee blogging over at Feministing that the Spring Equinox (which falls on the 20th or 21st of March every year) in Canada is now officially Indigenous Women’s Empowerment Day.

Gatherings to commemorate Indigenous Women’s Empowerment Day started in 2006 in BC, and have been organised every year by the Kookum Educating Traditional Acceptance Society.

As Jessica says:

I often reflect on the power of our traditions and the great culture of Native peoples that have been rejected through colonization, Christianization, and extreme genocide. We have so much in our ancestral teachings that supports respect for women, caring for the community, and love for Mother Earth. Yet today Indigenous women face the highest rates of domestic violence and poverty in the world. It is essential to recognize these injustices, but be proud of who and where we come from in the present world.

…Just to let you all know (a little bit late, sorry, still working on this self promotion thing) I will be on the radio later on today, talking about my novel The Same Woman and how our culture perpetuates jealousy between women.

5 - 6 pm
22 March 2008
Sex City
CIUT 89.5
Toronto

If you gather around your radio and clap really hard, I’ll probably hear you.

Miranda July teaches you how to make buttons.

Try it the next time you’re at a button factory.

I do love a good romantic comedy. And there are so few fluffy romance movies with queer couples – on the big screen, nearly every lesbian love story ends in murder or suicide. Until recently, my mental list of happy queer romance movies included (1) D.E.B.S., (2) The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, and… well, that was it.

I’m adding another film to my list. Show Me Love is about two girls in love in small-town Sweden. (It’s from 1998 – I’m always behind the curve on this stuff.) I like that it’s a movie about teenagers played by teenagers, not 25-year-olds. It is funny and awkward and believable, and I promise, it will win you over. Go on, buy some chocolate and curl up in bed.

I found Show Me Love at my local video store, West Side Stories. You can’t throw a DVD in the west end of Toronto lately without hitting an indie rental joint, but West Side Stories is special. For one thing, they’re super friendly. Just west of Dundas and Dufferin, they are also Toronto’s first DVD merchants “specializing in women and the LGBT community.”

Besides the usual new releases and a solid collection of hipster favourites, Dawn and Tanya have a good selection of queer flicks and section for “women in film.” They have also been hosting small film screenings. The next one is next Saturday, 29 March at 10pm. The movie is Mai’s America and I really wish that I could go, so you should go for me. (Note that according to Facebook, the event is “women only safespace.”)

It may not have felt like it here in Toronto, but yesterday was the first day of spring. Another sign that winter’s almost done? Easter. The Shameless Bloggers are simply too busy painting eggs and eagerly awaiting the Bunny to blog.

There will be limited posting over the holiday weekend. We’ll be back next week.

The most recent issue of the Oral Otis, the University of Ottawa’s Engineering Students’ Society paper, featured misogynistic content. Again.

The Bad
Professor Kathryn Trevenen, with U of O’s School of Political Studies, “said the article was in such poor taste that she doesn’t think students should be paying for the newspaper out of their non-academic fees” (full article at the CBC).

The article in question was an advice column which contained “graphic references to anal sex, sexual aggression and pedophilia.”

The Ugly
Responding to controversy over a previous issue, U of O’s student newspaper The Fulcrum quoted the Oral Otis’ editor-in-chief Zacharie Brunet as saying:

“I was aware that [the article] was a little bit pushing it, but it was our first time writing a paper. I had no guidelines to follow; I didn’t know what the line was [and] if we were crossing it or not.”

Now that Zacharie has some experience under his belt, just what did he see fit to publish this time? From Professor Trevenen’s letter:

After counselling men on the biological irrelevance of the female orgasm, the authors offer “tricks that will get her to think twice about finishing faster than a pedophile at a preschool.” They encourage, “jerking off on her after she’s finished: if she doesn’t get the message after the first or second time, she’ll sure get the message when you start aiming for the eyes.” Finally, they recommend anal sex in language that evokes rape. They say: “Don’t stop: Hey, if she’s screaming and moaning in pleasure, just keep thrusting harder and don’t let her get away…remember, you two aren’t finished until you say you are.”

Rob Arntfeld is the vice-president of social affairs for the Engineering Student Society. The CBC quotes his response:

“For myself, personally, I think some of the content in the paper is meant to be humorous,” he said. He added that engineers “have taken a lot of flak for being engineers,” and are often the subject of jokes about engineers rarely touching women or getting laid.

“I believe that when we take this sort of thing in stride and that sexual harassment, if we dish out a little bit of our own, who’s to say who’s more right?”

The Good
What the CBC article didn’t mention, which was covered in the several more comprehensive pieces at The Fulcrum are the reactions from the university as a whole, and the repercussions for the ESS and its newspaper. (Unlike the CBC, The Fulcrum also didn’t position the story as ‘Feminist Prof v Engineers’, but that’s a separate post)

(more inside…)

Via Boing Boing:

Oh, kids these days.

Canadian high schooler’s Arman Noory’s “The War on Terror” is a short film that includes safe-for-work scenes of a 1980s porn video.

Noory had this to say abut the project:

…for the record, for anybody curious, my teacher knew I had edited an early 80s porn for the video, though the students generally had no idea…

I chose to make a video for my culminating task for senior-year (Canadian) Politics class was regarding the war on terror and whether or not it’s effective/justified. I wanted to incite a variety of emotions in the viewer while still being educational and entertaining…

You can watch the safe for work video here.

…or putting in a little extra.

We all know now that just about any image of a woman on a poster, ad, billboard, or album cover has been (heavily) manipulated. Smoothed and cloned and lifted and trimmed.

But it’s refreshing to know it in a tangible “look at that right there” way as opposed to a more hand-wavy ephemeral way.

To that end, I give you Photoshop Disasters.

It’s a site dedicated to posting and mocking any and all public Photoshop screw-ups. But there are so many reworked images of women to choose from that they currently make up the bulk of the posts. Women remade in the texture of rubber, moded to look like anime, or, more comically, given extra hands:

“Sir Lancelot gazed fondly into the soft blue pools of Lady Guinevere’s eyes and gently held her mutant third hand. Wait, what?”