News- and Blogwatch

Here’s what I’ve been reading this week:

Women now have a majority in the Swiss government. That is a huge achievement, especially considering that Swiss women were not allowed to vote until 1971! So I should be excited, right? Well, I am, except for this:

The new entrant to the Swiss cabinet, Simonetta Sommaruga, who is 50 and from the Social Democratic Party, had made a name for herself as a champion of consumers, rather than women’s, rights. “She is very credible for people from all parties — she is not a feminist or leftist,” said Lukas Godber,[...]. (NY Times, Sept.22 2010)

And this:

Nor does the realignment represent any broader shift toward gender equality in other areas of Swiss society, Mr. Lutz said. “Women are still underrepresented in Parliament,” he said. “They are not equal in society. They earn less. How many women do you see in leading positions in business?” (NY Times, Sept.22 2010)

The Sweden Democrats (SD), which are quite ‘Swedish’ but not that democratic, have been voted into the Swedish parliament, prompting another article on the rise of Europe’s far-right.

Women are leaving Wall Street.

Terminated: Why the Women of Wall Street Are Disappearing

La dialectique casse des briques has a detailed summary of a conference held in Paris about France’s expulsion of the Roma. Among the speakers were French intellectuals Luc Boltanski and Jaques Rancière.

After the suicide of yet another bullied gay teenager in an American suburb, advice columnist and gay activist Dan Savage has started a Youtube channel with the slogan ‘It Gets Better’, where everyone can upload videos telling LGBTQ kids and teenagers to hang in there because their lives will improve drastically after high school and small town bigotry. Watch the videos here.

Holiday News

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to post any new blog entries lately as I have been on vacation and lacked a proper internet access. Now I’m back but haven’t had time to catch up on all my favourite blogs and last week’s most exciting news. So here are just a few interesting articles from the last few days:

Hear her roar: "mama grizzly" Palin

Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post has written an interesting response to Sarah Palin’s new political ad that I featured in my last post. She illustrates perfectly well, by drawing on Jungian psychology, how important it is to take her rhetoric seriously: “It’s not Palin’s positions people respond to — it’s her use of symbols. Mama grizzlies rearing up to protect their young? That’s straight out of Jung’s “collective unconscious” — the term Jung used to describe the part of the unconscious mind that, unlike the personal unconscious, is shared by all human beings, made up of archetypes, or, in Jung’s words, “universal images that have existed since the remotest times.”"

Taking Sarah Palin seriously as a political force is one thing, but it doesn’t mean you can’t have a laugh about the silliness of her ad either. Last Tuesday night’s The Daily Show featured a hilarious contribution by Senior Women’s Issues Correspondent Kristen Schaal. You can watch the clip here.

On to another funny clip: While we’re still missing Sarah Haskins’ legendary Target Women episodes on Infomania, we can still get our fix of gender-related media satire by watching That’s Gay with Bryan Safi. Here’s his most recent one:

That fear of homosexuals is all but eliminated is also suggested by this article in the New York Times which addresses the F.D.A.’s ban of homosexual men from donating blood. Who knew? Obviously there are a lot of ridiculous regulations and laws in the United States but this one seems so obviously discriminatory; I cannot understand why it hasn’t been revoked already.

That’s it for today. More to come soon. Happy summer holidays to everyone!