Hello. Sort of a night shift here (won't be much around the computer as it's the weekend here, but I'll be checking Bitches from time to time.)
Kind of like asking us to eat pie to please you
WHERE IS YOUR PIE. GIVE ME ALL YOUR PIES. (Sorry, woke up, and still hungry. Then again, I could always eat something. [omnis, don't go there. It's too early]).
New Hampshire and Virginia
Yeah. As someone who follows feminist issues around the globe, jaw kindda hit the floor at that point. Here we had unbelievable luck in the past few weeks with feminist legislation (criminalization of buying sexual services - while the suggested law is far from being perfect, it's a start), and more importantly - a law (or, well, something) that will give grant to every woman who have been in a shelter due to domestic violence for over 30 days. Now, I'm saying "something" and not what exactly passed because starting to translate Israeli political system to American terms is a bit too much now as they're very different, but it's one or two votes away from becoming a law.
ION, I was raging yesterday in Twitter about visibility and hierarchy of feminist projects who use social media and/or the internet. Everyone was talking about project unbreakable tumblr, which is really great and wonderful and important, no doubt. And then I see another amazingly important project such as Women under siege project [link] and I know they're not going to have the same impact (and yes, I believe they deserve bigger impact than the tumblr project). I can't help but thinking that it's not just because the tumblr/pictures platform is a powerful one - but because these women aren't white and digitally literate. Again, it's not that the tumblr in itself isn't good - and I think I know by now how much work that takes - but the visibility that's concerning me.
And that takes me to different side, which I see over and over and over again; how Western feminists keep helping mostly the women they know in scenarios they are familiar with without thinking of the implications to other women. I'm fat from bring perfect on that myself, of course: Hollaback Israel still doesn't support Russian, Arabic and Amharic submissions even though we translated the strings (and the site totally crashed when we installed the translation plug in. Fun!), or the activists' group, which has other issues that I won't go in to because I'm writing this post for over 20 minutes now. But it bugs me, because I'm not just critical towards my own culture, but also to the way others - including me - are using resources in order to solve issues. I'm not looking for perfection, but I'm definitely looking for awareness.