Ok, so some might claim I’m just fishing for excuses to post this ridiculous video, but I swear, there’s something feminist about this one.

On a Cincinnati news show the weather reporter Bob Herzog throws a dance party every Friday morning that there are no traffic accidents. From the Globe and Mail:

The concept is simple: When there’s no traffic news on Friday morning – which happens regularly in Cincinnati, population 332,000 – it’s dance-party time in front of the traffic map…The phenomenon started last year when a friend showed Mr. Herzog a funny YouTube clip of high-school kids celebrating a “Dance Party Friday.”

“I thought, ‘I should do that once,’” Mr. Herzog said, quickly adding, “Don’t get me wrong – I can’t dance. At all. I’m bad – I’m really bad.”

…And thus, Dance Party Friday was born. There are ground rules, which Mr. Herzog discussed with his boss at the start: He dances only when there are no tragic stories in the news and no accidents on the road.

If you’re having trouble picturing this:

For me, a big part of why this video is funny is because it’s grown men in suits dancing badly. They’re so cheerfully making fools of themselves and in a sense, rejecting the expectations of seriousness, and taciturn professionalism, that we normally associate with grown men in suits.

And to me this video isn’t just funny, it’s also kind of exhilarating. Because who hasn’t wanted to shake their booty (or scream, or throw something heavy and possibly flaming…) in the face of workplace demands - demands which often include dehumanising ourselves, and following stringent gender guidelines on how to behave.

Do you hear distant cries of revolution? No? Ok, well at least enjoy the video. And if you want more, go here.

The Miss G______ Project for Equity in Education is looking to put together an activist anthology (an “actology” if you will) of art and writing by high school aged youth that take on and challenge the media. The working title for the project is “‘The Media is Not Fooling Me’: an Actology.”

Interested? Here are the details:

We want you to put your fabulous critical lenses on and take a long hard look at the media and mass-produced images of “how people should be” in society. At the same time, we want you to share your own positive affirmations, images, and ideas that are alternatives to those currently being produced by the mainstream.

Be creative, be critical, be satiric, be political!

(more inside…)

Queering Film: A celebration of award-winning films for, with and by
Black Lesbians

FRIDAY MARCH 28
Medical Sciences Building Auditorium, University of Toronto
1 King’s College Circle

Tickets are $12 at the door, and $10.00 in advance at Toronto Women’s
Bookstore, Good For Her, A Different Booklist, and This Ain’t the Rosedale Library. The festival is wheelchair accessible.

MPENZI: Black Women’s International Film and Video Festival will
showcase 5 award-winning national and internationally renowned films by 5 Black Lesbians as part of their 4th annual festival.

This year’s line-up includes:
· the Toronto Premiere of Rape For Who I Am, directed by Ugandan-born
British filmmaker Lovinsa Kavuma
· Pariah, written and directed by 2007 Sundance Screenwriting Fellow and
2008 Rockefeller Grant Nominee Dee Rees
· the Toronto Premiere of Legacy by British director Campbell Blackman
· the Toronto Premiere of local director Hana Abdul’s Before Nine; and
· named one of Toronto’s Top 10 Best Filmmakers by Cameron Bailey in NOW
Magazine, director/producer/writer Michèle Clarke’s Black Men and Me

This years programming will include the popular Caribbean food and
beverage reception at 5:30p.m.; films, panel discussion and Q&A from
6:30-9:00p.m.; and a silent auction. Brand new Mpenzi T-shirts and other merchandise will be for sale.

For more information, please visit www.mpenzi.ca.

Lately I’ve been getting links from co-conspirators around the blogosphere on both the fantastic and quite awful activities on the Feminist Front. And things move fast - last week I received a tip from Parents for Ethical Marketing that Procter & Gamble website BeingGirl.us had up an article that encouraged disordered eating in teen girls.

But before I could type “WHAT THE HEY YOU JERKS” into a subject line for a blog post, thanks to the efforts on the part of countless bloggers, writers and phone callers who inundated P & G, the article was removed from the US site.

So why am I blogging about this? Well, the article is still up on BeingGirl.ca, right here. Sigh.

You will note the article includes excellent suggestions like: force yourself to wait 30 minutes before you eat; write down everything you eat; and put up post-it notes around your room and locker to remind yourself not to eat, you fatty. Ok, the “you fatty” part was my own, but I can’t help but feel I was just making the implicit, explicit.

In case this doesn’t sound that bad to you, remember this information appeared unsolicited on a website targeted to girls just starting to have their periods. As in girls who are 12.

Let’s take a moment to celebrate the power of grassroots calls to action. Hooray! Clap clap! And now let’s start some grassroots action of our own: get in touch with Beinggirl.ca and ask them to get their nonsense off the Canadian site as well. Some places to start:

BeingGirl.ca Contact Us Form

Procter & Gamble Canada Contact Us Form

Responsible Shopper Profile With P&G Head Office in US Contact Info

Also check out the original call to action that started this all at the F-Word blog: it has numbers you can use to call the US office.

[And if you want to complain about some other things on this sprawling, multinational and honestly terrifying site, can I recommend that you also check out the page which reduces ALL of Africa to ten facts, mostly about giraffes and cheetahs. Also look for marketing that trains children on how to emotionally manipulate their moms into buying them deodorant.]

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.

Whoa!

Here’s an older, November ‘07 news piece that we somehow missed (from the BBC):

The several hundred vigilante women of India’s northern Uttar Pradesh state’s Banda area proudly call themselves the “gulabi gang” (pink gang)…[they] shun political parties and NGOs because, in the words of their feisty leader, Sampat Pal Devi, “they are always looking for kickbacks when they offer to fund us”.

Two years after they gave themselves a name and an attire, the women in pink have thrashed men who have abandoned or beaten their wives and unearthed corruption in the distribution of grain to the poor.

I have to admit that there’s something whoop!-inspiring about a gang of 100s of women who dress in pink, and go after men who’ve committed violence against women. Devi says, “Nobody comes to our help in these parts,” and I can’t help but be in awe of a gang of women who just ain’t gonna take it anymore.

But at the same time there’s something troubling about a large group of people descending on one person and beating them. Or is there? For Western feminists there’s always the temptation to idealise or simplify the stories of “3rd World” women who, confronted with a crumbling or ineffective infrastructure, take things into their own hands.

See after the jump for a beautiful comic by Elisha Lim (yes, yes, we’re related…) of One Hundred Butches fame, and her thoughts on the issue.

(more inside…)

We listened to music! We raffled! We silkscreened! And most importantly we read! Thanks so much for coming out to support us, sniffle.

If you had the very very sad misfortune of missing last Saturday’s bash, we proudly present some photos of the great time we had. Thanks to Wesley our webmaster for the photos (A webmaster who can also take beautiful photos? What a score!)

And as always, you can subscribe on this very website…

More photos of the event after the fold!(more inside…)

I don’t know if you’ve heard but there’s a rumour in the media going around that women are to blame for the current Canadian doctor crisis - perpetuated in part by Maclean’s Magazine, the jerks! That’s right, along with the destruction the home and the pandemic of pants-wearing, feminism is now out to ruin your health!

There’s a fabulous editorial in the recent issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) that criticises this dirty rumour:

The message conveyed by much of the coverage [of the 2007 National Physician Survey] and commentary implied that female physicians simply do not work as hard as their male colleagues. These reports seem to be telling Canadians “if you’re having trouble finding a physician, a large part of the blame lies with the increasing number of female doctors in the system.”…

In Canada, 33.3% of physicians are female; 48.6% of physicians under age 40 are women. Women provide more services than men in certain areas of medicine. The decline in physicians’ working hours is attributed more to the decline in hours worked by male physicians than the increasing proportion of female physicians. Women do work differently than their male counterparts: they put in many more hours in combining professional duties, childcare and household responsibilities.

From Romanow and Kirby to McKendry and the George expert panel, we are all attempting to understand and address this serious issue for all Canadians. To suggest that a physician workforce that more equitably represents women in the workplace is the barrier to access is frankly a sexist excuse for logic.

Yeah! You tell ‘em, CMAJ!