A week prior to the March 30^th Kenyan Supreme Court decision affirming the first round presidential election of Uhuru Kenyatta, venerable Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe died at eighty-two. His writing has garnered numerous literary honors in his over fifty year career as a satirist of socio-political machinations in pre- and post-colonial Africa. Before the Nigerian Revolution of 1966, Achebe wrote an ominously prophetic novel entitled “Man of the People” about a fictional post-independence West African nation modeled on Nigeria.  In his sardonic rendition of governance in post-colonial Africa, Achebe paints a chorus of sycophants pandering to the whims of a male-dominated authoritarian regime disguised as a republican democracy.  “Man of the People” provides a compelling narrative to juxtapose against current politics in Kenya—not to foreshadow revolution so much as to emphasize the need for revolution.

In the novel, the so called ‘man of the people’ is a former school teacher who enters politics for the status and riches that African public service has come to represent since the erosion of Pan Africanism. He ascends the ranks, flattering his superiors, to emerge as the preferred leader of an all-boys club of greedy politicians, of which he is the most self-indulgent, coopting resources and women as he pleases. In time, a former pupil becomes his adversary for political power and Achebe explores the manner in which sexist, elitist, and xenophobic African men inform neo-colonial politics in Africa. For decades men have defined contemporary African politics and the time has come for African women to take the lead.

Within days of the election, Odinga submitted a constitutionally sanctioned Supreme Court petition against president-elect Kenyatta, his running mate William Ruto, and the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC)—the independent commission charged with registering voters, managing polls, and tallying votes cast— claiming poll irregularities and calling for a second round election.

Aside from Odinga, two notable special interest groups called for fresh elections. Africa Centre for Open Governance (Africog), masterfully represented by female lawyer Kethi Kilonzo, and the Katiba Institute, led by constitutional law expert Yash Pal Ghai, alleged IEBC poll anomalies and challenged the integrity of Kenyatta/Ruto, respectively. Katiba Institute’s petition was ultimately rejected for bias against Kenyatta and Ruto as outspoken critics regarding their indictment by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on crimes against humanity in the 2007-08 post-election violence.

Within three weeks of the CORD petition, public hearings were broadcast on television and radio through March 30^th when the Supreme Court upheld the credibility of the March 4^th elections. The Supreme Court, a six-judge panel with only one woman, Hon. Justice Njoki Ndung’u, provided a conservative ruling that suggests Kenyan governance is unable or unwilling to aggressively challenge old guard politics. One cannot help but wonder what the outcome may have been with more women on the panel.

Despite the artifice of a lavish, modern inauguration for Uhuru Kenyatta on April 9, 2013, his presidency continues a 50-year trend of nearly all-male de-facto one-party rule in Kenya.  It maintains a tight circle of regime exchange beginning with Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president and father of Uhuru (no pun intended for Swahili speakers…). Uhuru’s predecessor, outgoing president Mwai Kibaki, an economist and fat cat bureaucrat, joined the world of politics during the first Kenyatta administration. Like Kenya’s second president, Daniel Toroitich arap Moi, who inherited and expanded the repressive regime of Jomo Kenyatta upon his death in 1978, Kibaki lay in waiting for his turn at the presidency which came in 2002 after two failed election bids.

Although both international observers and the Kenya Supreme Court deemed the election free and fair, the electoral process was nothing more than status quo politics at work. Yes, Kenya maintained “peace” before and after elections (despite violence in coastal Mombasa by a radical faction, state police killing of youth in Kisumu, and uprisings in areas like Mathare Valley, all under investigation). But the rhetoric of peace came at a cost. The national and international super-engine promoting peace before, during and after elections, inadvertently fostered a non-critical malaise or ‘peace coma’ with many fearful of inciting unrest by critical discourse—in short, most of us drank the Kool Aid. Dissenting voices were all but silenced from national conversation, most dramatically during the incredibly long, five-day vote tallying process.

Anti-corruption journalist and activist John Githongo assessed the silence after the first round election of Uhuru Kenyatta as indicative of a more ethnically polarized nation. He argued “…what we have is Brand Kenya instead of a Kenyan Nation; what unites us are transactions rather than shared beliefs and values…” Although Kenya sang hymns of peace in public, ethnic polarization played out heavily online. Indeed, for many, but not all Kenyans, the financially lush Jubilee campaign (seeded by Kenyatta’s millionaire status), the execution of  a credible election to assure investors, and Kenyatta’s faux Mau Mau rhetoric aligning the ICC with colonial occupation has bought and sold Kenya to the highest bidder—a second generation father-figure as head of state.

Jomo Kenyatta’s legacy looms large in Kenya’s history as the so-called father of the nation, a paternalistic role attributed to many leaders of newly independent African nations since Sudan gained independence in 1956. These ‘fathers of the nation’ were of varying temperaments, reacting to  white  domination and balkanized borders drawn up by European powers, and formulating national identities from an amalgam of ethnic communities.

During the African independence struggle, Pan Africanism served as the collectivist ideology for a movement of the same name, meant to redefine a continent of over 50 countries under the banner of self-knowledge and self-determination. To an extent, the presupposition of a broadly definitive ‘Africanness’ was the undoing of Pan Africanism in post-colonial times, as nations clashed intellectually over the nuances of their individual brand of African identity—relative to their colonial experiences, pre-colonial history, and socio-economic policies.  

As a movement, Pan Africanism provided a language of mobilization that captured tenets of cooperation resonant to many African cultures and the shared experience of racialized oppression.  The movement was prominently male with numerous women serving as unsung leaders, administrators, political advisors, and advocates whose acts of courage are grossly underreported. However, it was counterproductive  to international and national interests to exploit African resources that pulled rank on development, so the Pan African Dream faded, giving way to the so-called ‘man of the people.’

In this light, the election of Uhuru Kenyatta continues a disappointing trend, for a number of reasons: First, the all-boys club of Kenyan presidential politics continues. Martha Karua, lawyer and former parliamentarian, contributed to herstory as the third woman to bid for the highest office this election, and came in sixth place.  In 1997 entrepreneur turned politician Charity Ngilu and the late Nobel Laureate Wangari Mathaai were the first women to run for president in Kenya.  Second, The global trend of electing, by hook or by crook, super rich public servants only asserts growing economic inequality and the pathology of paternal allowances in lieu of structural change.  Third, the truth of President Kenyatta’s involvement in crimes against humanity remains in question, and International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, says she is vigilant to convict him and his Vice President William Ruto. However, the recent dismissal of charges against suspect and former civil servant Francis Muthaura follows a trend of witness intimidation, according to Bensouda, and poses a serious question as to whether Kenyatta and Ruto’s pending trials will lead to a conviction. Fourth, Kenyatta and Ruto come from the Kikuyu and Kalenjin peoples, respectively, and these two historically contentious ethnic groups have dominated Kenyan presidential politics since independence in 1963. Although Kenyatta has vowed to unify the nation, class politics and national history paint a different picture with long unresolved issues over land rights and resource distribution.

What is new with this election  is, although the constitutional mandate for one-third representation of women is not yet met, parliament has the largest representation of women in public office in history, with more herstory to be made. Also, for the first time ever, Kenya has a constitutional, albeit conservative, Supreme Court.  In Raila Odinga, Kenya has an independent, internationally recognized, opposition leader agitating for full implementation of the 2010 Constitution. And finally, as noted by the brilliant woman economist, Dambisa Moyo, Africa has emerging competitive markets while American and European economies experience ongoing stagnation. Nevertheless, as this election may indicate, Africans cannot sacrifice democracy for economic gain for the few and pittance for the many. Paternalistic male leadership must come to an end as women, particularly women committed to structural transformation, take the lead, are recognized as such, and form partnerships with progressive male colleagues. Thus, from the shadows, a more inclusive innovation of the Pan African Dream must emerge.

“For all of us, the only thing that moves us is our children,” explained Norma Andrade, Juárez activist and founder of May Our Daughters Return Home in a 2012 interview with Mexican filmmaker Ernesto Godoy. Andrade’s daughter, Lilia Alejandra, disappeared on February 14, 2001 and her body was discovered on February 21st, in what has become an epidemic of violence in Juárez over the last two decades. 

In 2013, the Juárez government started a citywide campaign with the title “Disappearances in Juárez have to Disappear.” They distributed 100,000 posters showing a woman’s clothes but no body, and these were posted around the city. Although the issue of disappearance has not gained much attention recently, the mothers of Juárez continue to turn their pain into action for justice for the disappeared and murdered. In February of 2013, a group of mothers marched to the capital, Chihuahua, to protest the 316 unresolved disappearances of 2012 and the 16 more that had occurred in 2013, all in Juárez.  Since one of the perpetual problems is that such cases are not investigated, the mothers met with the governor to demand that he investigate and resolve these crimes.

These activist women follow a long tradition of Latin American mothers who have taken to the streets to protest the disappearance of their children, notably the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. That group of mothers and grandmothers started demonstrating in front of the presidential palace in Buenos Aires in 1977, to protest mass disappearances perpetrated by the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983.

Like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who were at first called “crazy” by government officials, the mothers in Juárez have faced both personal and physical attacks as they seek justice for their daughters. In 2011, Andrade survived a shooting attempt on her life in Juárez, one she believes was directed at silencing her activism. She was forced to flee to Mexico City for her safety. However, in Mexico City she was attacked again, this time stabbed in the neck. Andrade’s other daughter, Malú, became a human rights activist and works to support mothers in the same situation as Andrade.  Andrade appears in the documentary about disappearance and feminicide in Juárez, Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita extraviada (Missing Young Woman).

“Reality is so bereft of humanity, so barbaric, that we cannot grasp it without the delicacy of art. Through art we can feel the loss, and we can understand it without falling prey to sensationalism,” explained Portillo during our interview. It was through Portillo’s documentary Señorita extraviada (Missing Young Woman) and the work of Juárez photographer Julián Cardona that I first met activist Paula Flores. Their images of Flores, whose daughter María Sagrario was disappeared and later murdered in April 1998, showed a woman transformed by pain, a woman who passed through the phase of victimhood to become an activist. “Paula Flores has been a leading activist, and has had the wherewithal to do things that have some transcendence,” said Portillo. Flores created the the María Sagrario Foundation to fund a school in her neighborhood in Juárez, and her daughter Guillermina González founded and ran the NGO Voces sin eco (Voces Without Echo) from 1998 to 2001. When I met Flores in Mexico City in 2011, she discussed how she, like Norma, was inspired to continue her activism for her children and he grandchildren. Flores attended the presentation of Rafael Bonilla’s La Carta (The Letter), a documentary about her life. When Flores got up to speak to the audience, her tiny granddaughter, Ruby, stood up in her seat and yelled, “I love you grandma!”           

Mother’s Day is one day, that comes and then goes. Yet mothers and grandmothers like Flores and Andrade persist and,  in the face of overwhelming physical and economic violence, find the strength to create change.

April 5, 2013, marked the 1000-day milestone in working towards the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals. The fifth goal, MDG 5, is to reduce the maternal mortality ratio by 75 percent from 1990 to 2015 and to achieve universal access to reproductive health.

While important progress has been made, we are not nearly close enough to reaching MDG 5. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 800 women die every day across the globe due to avoidable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. In 2010—two-thirds of the way through the MDG period—287,000 women died due to childbirth or pregnancy, only a 47 percent decline from 1990.

Mahmoud Fathalla, former president of the International Federation of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, points to the social implications of these horrifying statistics in “Human Rights Aspects of Safe Motherhood,” his 2006 study: “Women are not dying during pregnancy and childbirth because of conditions that are difficult to manage. They are dying because the societies in which they live did not see fit to invest what is needed to save their lives.”

Giving birth should not be a death sentence.

In Ghana, where the maternal mortality ratio is 350 deaths for every 100,000 live births—one of the highest in the world—some have started to think outside traditional measures to reach MDG 5. Inspired by Dr. Kwesi Owusu’s documentary, "The Lights Have Gone Out Again," a new television series sheds light on the debate surrounding maternal health strategies while disseminating vital pre- and post-natal health information to Ghanaians: the "Maternal Health Channel" (MHC).

The MHC began airing in February 2013 and is scheduled to continue for a year. The series broadcasts one 30-minute weekly episode for two evening slots on GTV and TV3 in Ghana.

While it takes the form of a TV series, the MHC is very much a channel—or a road or conduit—in that it seeks to connect people to something they need: in this case, maternal health information. Rather than discrete episodes, each individual program combines documentary footage, news broadcast, and narrative drama.

The first problem that leads to high maternal mortality rates in Ghana is a delay at home: when families are unable to spot problem signs related to pregnancy. There's often a further delay in reaching a hospital due to poor infrastructure. And the hospital is likely to be over-crowded and under-staffed, causing more delays in treatment that put women's lives at risk.

Television can help combat the initial delay—the lack of information at home—given its popularity in both rural and urban regions of Ghana. According to a 2009 survey, more than 80 percent of Ghanaians regularly watch television. With so many people tuning in, the MHC has the potential to significantly affect the way people respond to pregnancy and childbirth. Women and their families can receive information that will better equip them to make early decisions about maternal health and safety.

Television can also relieve issues caused by poor infrastructure. In a society that lacks stable infrastructure, broadcast media become one of the more reliable ways to reach people, spread information, and keep people connected. Media theorist Rudolf Arnheim suggested decades ago that television resembles the “motor-car and the aeroplane” in its ability to connect us and, even, transport us mentally—and this is as true today as ever.

In the Kute-Buem region of Ghana, people use the phrase “plying the death” to describe the journey one takes via motorbike over poorly constructed and ill maintained dirt roads. As a response to high maternal mortality rates, the World Health Organization has encouraged women in labor to go to the hospital rather than seek local help, but for too many women that means  “plying the death.” If traditional birth attendants and women themselves had access to the maternal health information they need, fewer women would risk their lives trying to reach an under-staffed hospital in time. The MHC is an example of how television and broadcast media in general can connect us to vital resources when other infrastructure cannot. If the roads have failed, we have the airways to connect us to what we need.

But will the MHC ensure that Ghana reaches MDG 5? Most likely not. It can, however, broaden the conversation about women’s health as a key to peacekeeping as well as social and economic development. Perhaps most significantly, the MHC will ultimately help us begin to imagine the ways we might use television and broadcast more generally to improve women’s health—and subsequently advance women’s rights and amplify women’s voices.

In a dusty yard divided by long, plywood panels thick with layers of paint, over a dozen women staked out their spots. Visitors walking up and down the rows watched as each artist’s individual style emerged: complex, angular lettering here, a flowing abstract design there, bold round text just around the corner. Embellished with everything from large, whimsical cupcakes that bookended the work of one artist to the sweeping, delicate flourishes of another, each piece was both statement and self-portrait.

They had gathered for Writerz Blok’s first B-Girl BBQ, which drew graffiti artists, DJs, emcees, and b-girls from as far away as San Francisco and Brazil. One of the few known local events of its kind to showcase women in the hip hop community, Writerz Blok – an urban art center for youth in southeastern San Diego – hopes it will spark interest in creating mentoring opportunities for women and girls.

Sergio Gonzalez, a staff member at Writerz Blok, said it’s mostly boys and young men who participate in their programs. While the staff – all men – has been able to mentor and relate to the personal experiences that brought many of the guys to them, they’ve found it more challenging to provide a similar experience for the few young women who do drop in. “We’d like to work with the women in the community to create a program that can offer that, with workshops led by women artists and events like this that celebrate their achievements.”

As the relaxed crowd built throughout the afternoon, they gathered around the dance floor where b-girls and b-boys warmed up to battle and a lineup of DJs spun an eclectic mix of beats. DJ Pnutz, who teaches her craft and recently produced her first album, got her start when she asked for turntables as a high school graduation gift. She said that hip hop, DJing, and producing can be a boy’s club. “I personally have never felt intimidated because of that. It motivates me; maybe it’s because of growing up being a bit of a tomboy. Sometimes I think that guys don't take me seriously at first: they just see another girl DJ. I have to prove to them that I'm just as good and not just doing this ‘cause my boyfriend got me into it. I can carry my own gear, I can set up my own decks, I can be totally independent.”

“It’s beautiful to see all the women at the event,” said b-girl Zoul, who began breaking at 13. Now a dance teacher at an elementary school, she and her battle partner, Akie, drove down from Los Angeles to compete. “It’s awesome that it’s geared towards women – that the focus is on us being acknowledged for our part in the hip hop community and that our contributions are being put out there.”

With aerosol can in hand, Irie punctuated a lime-green backdrop with careful strokes of bright purple paint. Her interest in graffiti began in the mid-1990s when she became inspired by her brother’s drawings. “One day I took one of his sketches to school and kids went bananas! They loved it, admired it, but most of all they respected it. I thought to myself, ‘I want to be a writer one day.’” Five years later she attended her first graffiti art show and was instantly hooked by the skill, discipline, and honor she found. For Irie, the B-Girl BBQ was a place where women could be recognized “not for the typical glitz and glam of the outward appearance, but for skills which can be attained regardless of economic status, race, body type, or whatever pop culture may deem to be ‘valuable.’”

At another wall, Unique periodically stepped back to examine her lettering. While her love of graffiti began in her teens, it took another 14 years before she picked up her first can. “I didn’t know anyone in the scene in San Diego,” she said. As she began finding and attending events on her own, Unique soon met artists who encouraged her and have since become her mentors. After missing out for so many years, she eagerly invites others to grab a can and get started. “You’ll never know you can do it if you never try it yourself.”

While the number of b-girls who signed up to battle for prize money was smaller than hoped for, the competition included a glimpse of the future when a fearless young girl took the floor and held her own. Zoul believes that, much like sports, exposure to b-girling and opportunities to learn at a young age could encourage more girls to participate.

When asked for her advice to girls and women who want to pursue graffiti art, Irie's response was, “Practice, practice, practice. It takes self-discipline and sacrifice to develop yourself as a respected artist. There are so many challenges women have to face in any field dominated by men, but as the phrase goes, ‘real recognize real.’”

It appears from the storefront that the Yangon Bakehouse is a business dedicated to bringing the taste of home to UN staff and diplomats missing their sandwiches and quiche. Indeed, those western lunches are being prepared and delivered to embassies, the United Nations and various nongovernmental organizations, yet the expat run venture is more tied to local culture than first meets the eye. One of the women preparing food spent years in prison without due process under Myanmar’s previous regime, another has come out of the sex trade, two others were orphaned during cyclone Nargis in 2008.

Their stories are hard. They live in a country where 38 percent of women are in the labor force, the majority of whom are unskilled. By becoming part of the Bakehouse apprenticeship program, these women spend up to a year learning the skills and earning a salary that will give them something beyond a fighting chance — they’re gaining control of their own lives.

Although the Bakehouse officially opened its doors this month, the apprentices (who wish to remain anonymous) have been undergoing training since November of last year. Currently nine women, who range in age from low twenties to mid forties, receive instruction in food preparation as well as in other areas such as reproductive health, personal finance, hospitality and English. One apprentice explains how her life has already changed in this short time: 

I have one daughter and she finished grade five and will go into grade six. Until last year the International Non-governmental Organization, Terre des Homme, supported school fees that now I can pay by myself and I don’t have to rely on them. I pay 50,000 Kyat (about $45 USD) for books, registration fees and other costs. I can buy material and make my daughter’s school uniform myself.

Yangon Bakehouse was the brainchild of Canadian expat Kelly Macdonald. “We realize that we can't change Myanmar ten women at a time, but for those ten women, we hope to make a difference.” The venture operates as a social enterprise with the sole purpose of advancing the lives of women. All profits are put back into the business and the training provided to the apprentices is meant to ensure not only long term employment but success in their personal lives and community as a whole.

Macdonald has spent the last two decades working in reproductive health in Africa and South East Asia. After eight years living in Yangon with her family, frustrated seeing women putting their health, personal safety and dignity at risk to support their families, she wants to take things in a new direction.

Says Macdonald, “I was ready to leave the reproductive health sector’s supply side of the equation and look at trying to do something for women who were forced into compromising decisions due to economic reasons.”

In true leadership style, the mother of two acknowledged both her strengths and weakness, then reached out to other like-minded women who could round out the skills required to launch a successful social enterprise. Together, American Heatherly Bucher, fellow Canadian Cavelle Dove, and Yangon restaurateur Phyu Phyu Tin recognized, along with Macdonald, a need for good European casual food in Yangon and took it to another level.

For practical reasons the Bakehouse, for now, focuses on lunches and catering in their newly opened space in central Yangon. By limiting their overhead this early in the game, the progress of the apprentices remains front and center. Without adequate salaries, explains Macdonald, “women do not have many options for making safe choices for their health and well being.”

Their strategy appears to already be paying off for one apprentice who explains her experience with the Bakehouse through a translator this way: “The biggest change in my life is that now I have money and I can solve my families problems. I have been able to pay off debt to the money lenders (40 percent interest per month). Before we always had family problems because of money.

A goal of the program is to place the apprentices in the growing hospitality industry in Myanmar or working in private homes once they’re finished. It’s hoped a few may choose to stay on at the Bakehouse to train the next wave of women seeking an opportunity to participate in Myanmar’s growing economy. No matter what lies ahead, these few women are embracing change that was unthinkable for them six months ago.

“This opportunity has allowed me to see things around me in a different way. I feel my eyes are more open,” one says. "I don't have to feel small around other people," explains another apprentice.

For Macdonald, such sentiments are pretty much what she had in mind as she and her team set their plans in motion.

“Eventally, we want all these women to realize that regardless of their backgrounds and where they came from, their voice matters and counts," she says. "Come elections in 2014, they have a voice in their community elections. All of this is part of empowerment, as hazy as that term is, I think all of it together adds up to an aware and empowered woman.”

Visit the Yangon Bakehouse’s website for more information or to make a donation. If you’d like to contact them directly email at: yangonbakehouse@gmail.com

Growing up, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan loved watching the TV show, “Wonder Woman,” starring Lynda Carter, who would spin around to transform into the superhero with her indestructible bracelets, Lasso of Truth, and superior combat skills. The show was like nothing else on TV, Guevara Flanagan says.

“This was the first time there was this larger than life female fantasy character who was running around saving people and stopping crime. I think it was the first time there was a woman on TV who had that kind of physicality and was the star,” Guevara-Flanagan said. “It was something you could play, and there weren’t characters before that that you could play. I mean how do you play a princess? You just kind of sit there, waiting for stuff to happen.”

Carter, along with TV's Bionic Woman Lindsay Wagner, comic book artists, real life superheroines such as feminist icon Gloria Steinem (who put Wonder Woman on the first cover of Ms. magazine in 1972- she is also featured on the Fall 2012 40th anniversary edition of Ms.), punk rock star Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and founder of Riot Grrrl, and other Wonder Woman fans appear in Guevara-Flanagan’s movie, "Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines." The movie has been at film festivals in places including Belfast, Perth and New York City and last December screened in San Francisco as a benefit for the Women’s Building as part of the Celebration of Craftswomen. On April 15, it premieres on Independent Lens on most PBS stations.

Guevara-Flanagan started researching Wonder Woman when she read an article about Gail Simone, Wonder Woman’s first female writer. She started looking into the character’s origins, and learned about her creator, Harvard-trained psychologist and inventor of the lie detector, William Moulton Marston.

“He wanted to create a hero in opposition to all those male superheroes who were out there,” Guevara-Flanagan said. “He recognized the educational value of comics, and he really felt women should be able to do anything a man could, but with more grace and diplomacy.”

He created something unique, Guevara-Flanagan says.

“She’s a female superhero who is at the center of her own story, and not a sidekick or a daughter or a lover,” she said. “It was really progressive.” 

Growing up, Jennifer Stuller, the author of Ink Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors, who appears in "Wonder Women!" says she liked strong female characters like Pippi Longstocking and those in "The Wizard of Oz." Having characters like them – and like Wonder Woman – out there is important, says Stuller.

“It’s hard to be what you can’t see,” Stuller says. “Looking at stories or politics when if all we see are people who don’t reflect who we are, it’s hard to imagine being that.”

Stuller says she is encouraged by events like GeekGirlCon, which celebrates the contributions of women in comics, video games, science, technology, and pop culture.

“You hear people saying things like, ‘I didn’t know women were writing and drawing comics,’” Stuller said. “That’s why creating visibility is so important, so women know those options are available to them.”

To find characters for her documentary, Guevara-Flanagan went to conferences and conventions like these, where she interviewed people dressed as Wonder Woman. That’s how she found Katie Pineda, a fourth-grader who in the film talks about how superheroes inspire her.

“They don’t give up,” she says, “Sometimes I get picked on at school, but I just tell myself, ‘Keep going, keep going – you can be more.’” 

Meeting people like Pineda and others for her film was a pleasure, the director says.

“There were moments where I was very humbled, like interviewing Gloria Steinem, who’s been a hero of mine,” she said. “And Kathleen Hanna who’s saying we may think we live in a more equitable society than we do, but there’s still a lot to be fighting for. I was happy to document that and also to think about how there’s room for a new generation of young women to have their own movement.”

Making the documentary was a way to explore our cultural obsessions about women, Guevara-Flanagan said. In the movie, sociology professor Katy Gilpatric talks about her study of females in action films, and how she found that about 30 percent of the characters die, either killing themselves or being killed by others. This was particularly surprising and disturbing to Guevara-Flanagan.

“It was like a powerful woman really can’t exist,” she said. “They can exist for a few moments, but our society can’t retain them. It was pretty shocking.”

"Wonder Women!" ends at a summer video camp in Seattle, Reel Girls, where teenagers learn to tell their stories through video. When the girls are asked if they want to continue this as a career, seemingly all of them raise their hands.

Guevara-Flanagan would like to see that – more women working in production so more stories about powerful, interesting, adventurous women could be made.

“I hope that the film engages young people to be more critical of the media,” she said. “But I also hope it empowers them to make their own media.”

The title of this feature has been corrected: the film is "Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines," not "Woman."

This past week, it seemed that Congress was inching toward a feeble compromise on the blandest of gun control measures. We need to keep up—in fact, intensify—the pressure, though, since gun defenders are deeply invested in their firepower. They identify with guns, because of what guns represent for them.

Guns don’t symbolize ‘womanhood’ to the comparatively
few women who own them. But guns mean something very personal about manhood to men who do.

If we didn’t already know that to rabid gun defenders guns symbolize the, ahem, penis, the NRA would reliably remind us. This week, on the NRA website, the feature article was titled: “Senate Debates an Impotent Gun Control Solution.”

I am not making this up.

So a few women friends and I decided we might as well cut to the chase and deal not with the symbol of what’s being vociferously defended but with what’s being defended itself.

Which brings us to the issue of penis control.

Does penis control infringe on the rights of penis owners or not?  What about public safety? Do we need new penis laws or need merely to toughen and enforce existing penis laws already on the books?

So it’s time to reassure those men who are gravely concerned—and fortunately not all men are, but the ones who are concerned really are—about this:

There will be no national registry of penis owners.

No one wants to regulate all penises—although quite a few women would like some regulation on some penises some of the time.

No penises will be confiscated, even if proven to be in the possession of felons or other convicted wife batterers, men with a record of violent actions, or the mentally ill.

Gentlemen, there is actually national support from women for men to carry concealed penises.

Furthermore, no one is saying that a man cannot regularly clean, oil, and caress his penis—although having more than one can be problematical, as can displaying it, not to speak of acquiring it illegally or under the counter, or via informal interactions with relatives and neighbors.

Let’s be clear: We do not think school guards openly carrying their penises makes our kids safer.

And since when have we ever needed assault penises?

Still, we sympathize with some men’s fear of being left defenseless without a loaded penis. After all, as it’s been pointed out, the only thing that can stop a bad man with a penis is a good man with a penis.

What’s more, we have compassion for your anxiety about a lack of ammunition. Yet there’s always Viagra!

Guys, we realize that you’re dealing with furious envy of the female capacity for multiple orgasms. We understand that the whole aspect of automatic and semi-automatic weapons really is about this, your one-shot capacity, often as premature ejaculation.

Sorry about that. 

Last, we hate to have to tell you this, but male or female, we’re all mortal—and someday they may have to pry your penis from your cold, dead hand.

Hear today's entire broadcase at this link: Women's Media Center Live with Robin Morgan.

“If your boss says, ‘Hey Sexy, lookin’ good today,’ to you at work, that’s a problem. What if a stranger says it to you on the street? Catcalls, staring, whistling and following are street harassment. It’s time to start calling it what it is,” reads a new anti-harassment subway ad in Philadelphia.

This month, transit riders in both Boston and Philadelphia will see new anti-sexual harassment ads on their system, while in Washington, D.C., the transit authority is planning the next phase of its anti-harassment campaign. The Boston campaign—one thousand copies of five new ads posted across the system—for a first time show men as potential targets of sexual harassment.

“We really wanted to establish two things [with these ads]: that everyone, regardless of gender, is entitled to a safe ride, and that fellow riders of all genders could potentially be an active bystander if they witness something inappropriate or illegal happening,” said Meg Bossong, manager of community engagement at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center (BARCC), one of the local groups working in partnership with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA).

Five years ago, MBTA launched the first PSA campaign in the nation focused on sexual harassment on public transportation. It released a second wave of ads in 2009. Overall, they reported a decrease in crimes. MBTA does more than just put up posters. Transit police take reports of sexual harassment seriously, Bossong said, and they work well with community groups to tackle the problem. Both BARCC and Fenway Health provided input on the campaign posters and they are resources for survivors who need emotional support and guidance.

In Philadelphia, the local Hollaback! chapter raised money themselves for ads on their transit system and then designed them. They officially launched on April 7, the first day of International Anti-Street Harassment Week.

After co-hosting a workshop with FAAN Mail for high school girls last year and making a video about the things men say to them on the street, Hollaback! Philly used some of those phrases in a few of the ads:

“Hey Sexy! Hey Baby! THIS IS STREET HARASSMENT”
“Hey, you a man or a woman? You a dyke? THIS IS STREET HARASSMENT”
“Can I have a smile? What's your name? You got a boyfriend? Where are you going? Come Here! Let me get at you! Oh you're ugly anyway. THIS IS STREET HARASSMENT”

“We hope people will use the ads to start conversations about their experiences with street harassment,” said Hollaback! Philly director Rochelle Keyhan. 

Another goal for the ads is to “get people to start associating the term ‘street harassment’ with ‘problem’ and ‘solvable,’ instead of ‘inevitable’ and ‘acceptable,’” said Anna Kegler, also of Hollaback! Philly.

As part of International Anti-Street Harassment Week, activists and community members will talk to transit riders about the ads and street harassment on April 13.

In Washington, D.C., after initially dismissing sexual harassment on their system as a problem when local activists brought it up as a concern a year ago, the Washington Area Metropolitan Transit Authority (WMATA), launched its anti-harassment campaign. Because WMATA has a close relationship with MBTA, they adapted their original PSA campaign.

One ad reads, “I’m not the one who should be ashamed. No one should make you feel uncomfortable with unwanted sexual comments or touching. Report sexual misconduct to Metro transit police.”

Last year, WMATA also launched an online reporting tool for sexual harassment, began tracking trends of both verbal and physical forms of harassment, and they are in the process of training their employees how to handle harassment reports. Caroline Lukas, media relations manager at WMATA, said, “The greatest outcome from this [campaign] has been the increased awareness we have seen from riders on the system.  That sexual harassment, assault and intimidation is not ok has become part of the dialogue in Washington, and that really is the best way to create lasting and sustainable change.”

Like MBTA, WMATA has worked with community groups like Collective Action for Safe Spaces (CASS) and the DC Rape Crisis Center (DCRCC) to shape the messaging of the campaign. They are currently planning a new Washington, D.C.-specific ad for the fall.

CASS co-founder Chai Shenoy said that to prevent sexual harassment on the transit system, “I'd like to see more campaigns, more dialogue, more bystander intervention, and more accountability to riders who do report these crimes. Washington, D.C., is moving in the right direction of making that come true.”

On April 10, WMATA partnered with CASS and my organization, Stop Street Harassment, to distribute fliers about how to report harassers at the Anacostia Metro station and bus stand during the evening rush hour, as part of International Anti-Street Harassment Week.

For transit agencies who want to make their systems safer, Lukas suggests they first listen to the concerns of the public and “give your riders a voice.”

A year ago, Rayma Suprani found herself facing up to 30 years imprisonment for threatening to undermine the Venezuelan government, and labelled one of a group of terrorists whose subversive activity was harmful to the future of the nation. Yet Suprani had not detonated a single bomb, nor was she a member of any militant group. Rather, Suprani’s alleged terrorism sprang from her work as a satirical cartoonist.

Absurd as it is, Suprani’s story is becoming more and more common among Venezuelan journalists. Harmless though they may seem, Suprani’s images are representative of what the Venezuelan government most fears—and what its country most needs—in the run-up to the April 14 elections. Hastily thrown together, they come on the heels of the death of the much beloved (and much maligned) leader, Hugo Chavez. They pit Nicolas Maduro, appointed as Chavez’s successor and the heir apparent to the presidency, against Henrique Capriles. The two candidates stand in stark contrast to one another and represent a bitter divide in the country’s politics. The current climate has served to make this election heated, polarized and—in a disturbing recent trend—dangerous.

Despite what some who oppose the current government may claim, up until now Venezuela’s political system has been a democracy that has been recognized for operating free and fair elections. Chavez’s own victory in 2012, while controversial, was accepted as legitimate. Yet today, despite its recent success, the government has displayed an increasing intolerance to criticism. Suprani is just one example of the journalists who have been threatened for producing work critical of the government in the last few years. In 2012, news outlets published reports on the levels of self-censorship in the country’s media in response to government pressure. Some journalists, such as Milagros Socorro, Mari Montes, Mariela Celis and Suprani herself, have bucked the trend and headed to social media to denounce their aggressors, or filed police reports against the programs and people that persecute them.

However, these individual protests are largely ineffectual without constitutional backing and the police remain uninvolved in prosecuting cases that prove inconvenient for the regime. In this way, while it falls short of outright violent persecution, the government has employed methods which limit press freedom through fear-mongering and embarrassment. It hinders the discourse essential to a healthy political atmosphere and an informed electorate. “Venezuela is not Iran,” explained Suprani in a 2012 interview, “People are not being hanged in public squares–but any Venezuelan that leaves his or her house in the morning runs the risk of not coming back because crime levels are so high…the government doesn’t murder openly, but it has a political reach that protects those responsible from facing justice.”

Indeed, even ordinary citizens are starting to feel the infringement of a paranoid ruling party on freedom of expression. On March 14, Lourdes Alicia Ortega Pérez was imprisoned for tweeting that posthumously, Chavez looked like a ‘wax doll.’ Soon after, the hashtag #tuitdeestablizador (subversive tweet) emerged, mocking the overreaction of the government. (To showcase how ridiculous it was, posts appeared such as ‘There’s no hot water in my house #subversivetweet’ or ‘Capriles is hot #subversive tweet’.)

To state that this would end with the election of a different party would be ingenuous. The leading opposition party—with significantly less leverage and therefore less opportunity to do so—has also been accused of dubious practices. Following the last election, there was a disturbance when the party was accused of retaining voter records in order to discriminate against those citizens who had voted against them. Since Chavez’s death, Capriles, the opposition leader, has been accused of baseless attacks on Maduro and speeches that aim to incite hatred against the Chavistas in his attempt to garner votes. The problem appears not to be within the current party itself, so much as in an increasing acceptance of open hostility within Venezuela’s political culture.

In the past weeks, the country has seen inflamed and accusatory rhetoric, a proliferation of blatant propaganda and a violent stand-off when supporters of the two parties clashed in a rally. The government’s use of violent threat and its intolerance to differing opinions is spilling over into an already-impassioned electorate, which is a dangerous combination. Venezuela’s politics are in bad shape; deeply divided and increasingly untrustworthy, now more than ever, the country needs free and fair discourse in order to progress.

In the current political atmosphere, is most vital to remember that what stands at stake is not which candidate emerges victorious, but the safety and wellbeing of the citizens for which they stand. With its valuable natural resources and strong links to the surrounding region, Venezuela has much potential. But until the violence and culture of fear abate, it seems unlikely to fulfil it. Before anything else, the country should focus on healing a broken political psychology, largely through an active effort to stem censorship and encourage constructive debate—including political satire—among its citizens. As Suprani states, in today’s Venezuela “having opinions has become dangerous and being a cartoonist has become a dangerous job. When that happens, it is no longer a democracy.”

In April of 2010, I was diagnosed as having Parkinson’s Disease. 

Now, before everyone gets dramatic or lugubrious, let’s fling some facts into the mistaken assumptions mix. Parkinson’s Disease—let’s say PD—is not life threatening. It has a long trajectory of progression—12, 15, 20 years. People who have early onset, in their thirties, say, have a far more challenging span ahead than those of us who are diagnosed in our sixties. You do the math. I’ll be pretty tuckered out by 90 anyway. There’s plenty of time ahead for writing, politics, laughter, love. Meanwhile, I’m fine and my quality of life feels mostly normal. More about all that later.

A few words about what the disease is—though just a few, since there are excellent FAQs and in-depth explanations on the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation (PDF) and other reliable PD organization websites. Basically, the brain, for various reasons we do not yet understand, stops producing dopamine. There are genetic inheritable factors, but not always, and there are environmental factors, but not always—such as exposure to pesticides or industrial manganese output, to which women are more susceptible than men. Dopamine is the chemical neurotransmitter responsible for many functions: movement, balance, mood, digestion, dexterity, and in some people vocal projection, sense of smell, color perception, cognitive impairment, and more.  It’s called a “boutique disease” since everyone has, in effect, her or his unique version of PD, and some clinicians now term it Parkinson’s diseases, since the symptoms and progress can vary so. There is as yet no cure or preventive measure for PD, but there are many—more every day—medications and treatment techniques that address the symptoms and slow the progression of the disease, which is a degenerative one. (I’m seriously un-fond of that adjective, which sounds suspiciously like degenerate, thus like a fundamentalist moralistic denunciation of my state.) 

Now,  back to the story.

The diagnosis wasn’t a shock; my mother had had PD, and for a year and a half, since noticing the first tiny tremor,  I’d been pretty sure that this was Parkinson’s, not any of the other things I was tested for by a neurologist convinced I didn’t have PD. I now know that the average time of misdiagnosis for PD is 3 to 5 years, since the disease can camouflage itself as other maladies—so I was lucky to slog through a mere year and a half.  You need a neurologist whose sub specialty is movement disorders, and there are only about 200 such specialists in the United States. I now have a superb one.

By the way, don’t you think it’s fitting that after life as an activist, I have a “movement disorder”? Isn’t the English language a delight?

It was actually a relief to know what I was dealing with. I should say “we” were dealing with. My friend and son, Blake Morgan, was with me when the diagnosis landed—and has been as vital and life-affirming a part of this process as the air I breathe and poems I write.

I took my time to digest the information, knowing it would seep like water through sand, slowly. I began to write about it—what I now call “The Grey Matter” poems, which will be in my next book of poetry—writing being my way of understanding what it is I’m living through. I broke into a positive mindset once I realized I needn’t relate to Parkinson’s the way my mother had—first with years of denial and refusal of medication, then decline and self pity.  I have the benefit of support she’d never had—in terms of medical advances, my art and other meaningful work I love, and a sense of global political community.  I haven’t lived my life the way she did, so I could have my PD my way. Which felt liberating.

The medication kicked in and the tremors stopped, balance went back to normal, and my bold handwriting returned from being a tiny scrawl. Most importantly, I had a four hour exam of my cognitive functioning—and I aced it. Game on.

For several months I kept my story to myself and Blake. In this culture, when you’ve been a public person your privacy is considered collective property—yes, even in  the women’s movement. And though I knew I would eventually publish what I was writing on the subject, for the time being I wisely gave myself privacy.  Then I began to tell a very few very close friends. I was worried they would henceforth see “sick person” when they looked at me and forget that I’m still just me.  But they saw me.  By now, three years in from the diagnosis, my friends and most of my acquaintances know—but this is my "coming out" to a broader audience. I’m glad I can do it from within the embrace of the WMC family, dedicated to telling the story of women’s realities not yet covered anywhere else.  And there’s a helluva story here—nor do I mean just mine.

Think of my reaction on learning that the presence of women (and of men of color) in research tests and clinical trials in general had not greatly improved since the 1986 NIH policy that was supposed to correct all that. The subjects in virtually all research programs had previously been male, it being thought that women were basically small men, differentiated only by reproductive organs. The heart attack research was particularly scandalous, since based on all-male research subjects, the medical establishment assumed women rarely had heart disease.  (For one thing, women having heart attacks present with different symptoms from men, yet men were considered the generic.) Because the women’s health movement protested long and loud, women were finally factored into the research—so today the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that the No. 1 cause of death for U.S. women is heart disease. Check out The Foundation for Gender Specific Medicine and the Society for Women’s Health Research. (By the way, gender specific research and treatment is in men’s self interest, too.)

Well, there I was, facing yet another front that needed attention for gender and racial/ethnic inclusion—one our lives depended on.So I attended an extraordinary three-day intensive training by the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation.This was PAIR, the Parkinson's Advocates in Research, a signature program of PDF. Through in-person trainings and an online course, it provides people with Parkinson’s and their care partners with the knowledge and skills needed to pair up with researchers to bring about better treatments faster. It’s now a national network of 200 PDF research advocates from 42 states who work to change how research is done. You can learn more about it and get involved in Parkinson’s research at www.pdf.org. Research needs volunteers without PD, too, for control groups.

There are other fine organizations working on PD education, treatment, research. No one has done more for research than dear Michael J. Fox and his foundation. But despite its acronym sounding like an email attachment, PDF  appealed to me. It was empowering the people involved—those with PD and their care partners. We were/are not passive recipients of advice or treatment, but active, curious, informed participants, with a sense of agency and a voice. For someone who’s spent decades working with women coming to voice, you see why I‘ve become a friend of PDF. My thanks go especially to Karlin Schroeder, Kelly Bresnahan, and Melissa Barry. Whenever people find each other through advocacy, it’s like the feminist click. That click is electric. It shimmers with energy; it vibrates with possibility.

A few more consciousness raising facts, and a personal update.

• One million Americans have PD—a figure expected to double by 2040 as population ages.
• The estimated economic burden is 14.4 billion dollars a year in the United States alone.
• Men are one and a half times more likely to have Parkinson's than women. (Except how do we know that for sure, given the skewed research subject population?)
• Women are 10 percent less likely to see a neurologist, which could improve their care.
• Occupational exposure to certain chemicals (PCBs) is associated with greater risk for Parkinson’s in women, but not in men.
• Women exhibit more dyskinesias (involuntary movement) in later stages of the disease than men.
• Women report more anxiety and depression, issues somewhat neglected in research until recently.
• There are very few trials that analyze data separately for men and women.
• To understand and treat Parkinson’s, research requires volunteers. Women are traditionally under-represented in these research studies. 
• PDF Research Advocates address this under-representation of women, and inequalities in research and care.  PDF offers a toll-free HelpLine, free educational materials at (800) 457-6676 or visit www.pdf.org.

As for me, this is actually a good time in my life.

I am NOT saying Disney stuff like “Oh, this disease is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.“ It is so not the best thing that’s ever happened to me. But hey, the Sombrero Galaxy is serenely undisturbed.  Some of PD is actually funny. Here’s a new way to brush your teeth: if you skip your meds and hold your toothbrush up to your face, you don’t need an electric one. You can also scramble eggs just by holding the bowl. Though you do have to be careful not to stab yourself in the eye with a mascara wand—such an embarrassing way to go blind. And if you get overtired, but try to stride down the street as usual, you’re going to weave a bit, which means passersby will think you’re drunk—and you won’t even have had any fun earning their disapproval.

Seriously, I realize there’s some heavy going, ahead, but as Hamlet noted, “Readiness is all.” And I feel ready for whatever comes. Besides, PD brought me the gift of urgency, a concrete reminder of our shared inevitable mortality. And I, being as much a lazy procrastinator as anybody, appreciate a deadline.

Meanwhile,  I’m exercising like crazy—shown to be vital in slowing the disease’s progress. And the disease is moving slowly. The meds are so far working well, and I feel generally good.  And busy!

Since the diagnosis, I’ve finished a new novel—and am working on my new book of poems. I’ve written quite a few essays/articles/blogs, some of which went flatteringly viral. I’ve worked with the Women’s Media Center as a board member,  and embarked on a new career (or rather, returned to one I had at age 4) with our radio show, WMC Live with Robin Morgan.  I’ve been delighted to be part of MAKERS—the Women who Make America—the documentary and the website. I’m still global editor for Ms. magazine, and I serve on the steering committee of the important new NGO, Donor Direct Action.

I’ve gardened—you should see my  old English roses!—until my back is in spasm but my soul in bliss. I’ve cooked some great dinners for dear friends, and we’ve sat in the garden drinking wine and talking and laughing while fireflies darted through the splashes of my home-built waterfall.

I cherish the women friends I’ve had for decades, as they do me. I’ve made  new ones, younger ones, too. I’ve grown even closer to and (slightly) more reliant on Blake, while celebrating his entering the fullness of a different manhood than this culture plans for males, and while getting to watch his talent mature and hear his art, his music, flourish.

So life is good. I’ll keep you posted. And—let’s do something about the under-represented majority in medical research??? And what about those PCBs???

Damn! Women’s work really IS never done!

April is Parkinson's Disease Awareness Month. Visit the PDF Website for information (in Spanish as well as English) on how to make a difference. To listen to the complete radio broadcast in which this commentary was aired, click on WMC Live with Robin Morgan, April 6, 2013.

To the middle and high school students who came to hear Angela Davis recently in Charlotte, North Carolina, she was a name from the past. They left knowing her activism continues. The lecture program sponsored by the Harvey B. Gantt Center described her as one who “has always emphasized the importance of building awareness for economic, racial and gender justice.”

For teacher Barbara Wesselman, 53, it was like “seeing history.” Of Davis, she said, “For me, she wasn’t a radical. She was in the front of helping things change.”

Davis ticked off a long list of her causes and projects, starting with her days as a child in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, and stopping at the organizing effort, she said, “in which I did not participate,” the worldwide effort “to free me.”

With new interviews with Davis, "Free Angela and All Political Prisoners” tells that story. Directed by Shola Lynch, the historical vérité style documentary, a U.S.-French production, opens on April 5 in selected cities. It comes more than 40 years after Davis’ acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy in the 1970 killing of Judge Harold Haley in Marin County, California.

In the 1960s and 1970s, with citizens challenging authority, Davis became a symbol of the struggle between generations and often within families. Her on-the-frontlines activism and associations, from SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) to the Black Panther Party and the Communist Party hit a divided society’s hot buttons. Davis’s profile, with signature Afro, became iconic.

In Charlotte, the 69-year-old Davis wanted the students to know that her organizing work began long before.

Her earliest memories were “the sound of bombs exploding” in her Birmingham neighborhood, with black families edging close to the white enclaves carved out nearby, Davis said. She and her black playmates would dare each other to run across the street, with extra points if you rang the doorbell of a white family. “In a sense, that was already organizing.” Davis said it also taught her something about what organizing should be—“fun.” She organized interracial study groups, illegal in Alabama at that time.

Davis said she was only following the path of her mother, a woman who craved education so much she ran away from foster parents and the small Alabama town where black children went to work, not school, and settled in Birmingham. As a child, Angela Davis spent summers in New York where her mother traveled to study for a master’s degree. There she learned that a segregated life was not the rule everywhere, although the affluent parents of white high school classmates awkwardly asked their black maids to sit at the dinner table when she visited.

On weekends, she would join other activists picketing Woolworth’s to protest its policies of segregated lunch counters in other parts of the country. She was studying abroad in college when she learned of the 1963 church bombing of four young girls in a Birmingham church; they were children she had known and her mother had taught.

On April 4, 1968, the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Davis was active in SNCC in Los Angeles, a group that she said eventually ended up disbanding because of sexism. Though women were heading many SNCC projects – that’s “usually the case, that woman are running the organization,” whether it’s the church or school – “the guys wanted to be the ones to hold the press conferences and give the speeches,” she said.

“Even though it was a struggle about the roles women should play, not all of the women agreed,” Davis said, “and there were some men who stood with the women. It wasn’t so much a struggle of men and women; it was a struggle around the role of gender. … It’s important to recognize that things are never so neatly situated as they sometimes appear to be.”

Davis became a public figure after she was hired to teach at UCLA in the late 1960s then fired for her association with the Communist Party. Though the courts ruled in her favor and she resumed her work, there were death threats and campus bodyguards. “Had I known,” Davis said in Charlotte, “I probably would not have accepted that job. I prefer to do work in the background.”

In August 1970, when one of her personal bodyguards, brother of one of three California prison inmates known as the Soledad Brothers, initiated a courtroom breakout, and a shootout resulted in deaths and injuries, Davis was charged. She fled the state and was arrested two months later in New York.

In Charlotte, Davis told the story of how she discovered she had been assigned a spot on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. She was in Florida, watching an episode of TV’s “The F.B.I.,” when the show’s star, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., came on “with this big poster of me,” and described her as “armed and dangerous.”

Churches, schools, writers and others formed committees. John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded a song. East Germany school children sent postcards.  “I didn’t want the campaign to just be about me,” Davis said. “There were many other prisoners who deserved that support as well.”

A critic of a justice system that she said is focused on vengeance, Davis is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to dismantling the “prison industrial complex.”

“I haven’t really changed very much,” she said. “Hopefully I’ve grown a bit wiser and understand things a little more deeply. But I’m still very much a socialist, a communist with a small ‘c’ if you want to put it that way.”

Now distinguished professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Davis said she is a supporter of President Obama, but is critical of some of his policies. “More than Obama himself, I appreciate all of the people who have made it possible for him to be elected,” she told me after her Charlotte talk. “He needs to be pressured; he himself has said many times he can’t do it by himself.

“In many ways during the first term people voted for him and then went home and said to him, ‘well, you do all of the work.’ I’m very heartened by the fact that he in his inauguration speech linked LGBT issues with women’s issues with anti-racist issues. But we have to mobilize and pressure him to speak out on other issues as well. He hasn’t yet talked about mass imprisonment. … I think he really needs to give some leadership to the country about how to deal with the prison crisis. It is the new Jim Crow. It is also about the involvement of the whole prison system in the economy, in the global economy. When you reach a point where it becomes profitable to imprison people, you have to also challenge capitalism.”

After listening to Davis, 14-year-old Damarys Garcia said she was impressed “that she wouldn’t give up. … She changed the world.”

Davis returned her audience’s admiration. “I am really excited at the work I do with people who are much younger than I am,” she said. “I enjoy remembering what it was like not to know so much.”

“Free Angela and All Political Prisoners” won best documentary at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, where Davis appeared. For audiences, it will be a reminder, a revelation or a bit of both.

On the surface, Alice Sheba and Paldon Dolma don’t seem to have much in common. Alice is 87, Jewish, and a born-and-bred New Yorker; Paldon is 17, a Buddhist, and from Tibet. Yet, as they talk intently, their heads bent over some sheets of paper on a tiny table in a New York City Barnes and Noble bookstore, one can see they are completely comfortable with each other.

Alice is Paldon’s mentor in a unique afterschool arts program for high school girls who aspire to be writers.  Girls Write Now pairs girls in underserved neighborhoods of New York City with professional women writers who work with them on a weekly basis to draft and edit their projects.  Alice and Paldon hit it off immediately at an initial “match-up” orientation once Alice learned that Paldon is from Tibet and that they share a concern for the fate of Tibetan people living under Chinese control.  Back in the 1950s, she has told Paldon, she joined protests against the Chinese invasion of Tibet, leading to the forced exile of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government.  Paldon has spent hours every week passing out pamphlets, gathering signatures, and explaining the plight of Tibetans outside the United Nations.

Fearing for their safety and wanting a better future for their children, Paldon’s parents sent her and her older brother to live with an uncle in India when she was only seven years old.  Five years later, the uncle brought the two children to New York, and an aunt sponsored them for political asylum.  Although she had begun to learn English in India, at first Paldon felt like a misfit.  She had great difficulty understanding American English and “the students were disobedient, challenging teachers, misbehaving in inappropriate ways such as using vulgar language.”  She looked different in her “helmet haircut” and unstylish clothes.

Alice understands about feeling like an outsider.  Although born in New York, she has told Paldon, her Russian-Jewish mother thought European values were superior to American.  And because her parents only spoke Yiddish at home, Alice knew no English when she started school.  Alice was also no stranger to oppression:  her father’s entire family was killed in Poland during the Holocaust, and their pictures and histories were a vivid part of her childhood.

Similar in some ways but worlds and decades apart in others, Paldon and Alice came closer together during one of their weekly mentoring sessions when Paldon told Alice she was reading Elie Wiesel’s Night in her English class.  Alice told Paldon that when the Dalai Lama visited the United States, he met with leaders from the Jewish community, who advised him to continue the Tibetan Buddhist practice and culture while in exile. She suggested that Paldon write a letter to Wiesel.  The result, a passionate essay pleading for Wiesel to take up the Dalai Lama’s cause based on his own compassion as a Holocaust survivor, incorporates Paldon’s deep knowledge of Tibetan history and concern for its future.

“To be silent is to be a partner in evil,” Alice says to Paldon.  And Paldon writes to Wiesel, “In your Nobel Prize speech in 1986, you stated ‘Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.’” (Paldon has also appealed to President Barack Obama via a YouTube video.)

The pair has been working together for six months.  At their weekly writing sessions, held close to Alice’s apartment, Alice urges Paldon to revise, revise, revise—advice that Paldon has come to appreciate.  Alice also invited Paldon to see the movie “Lincoln,” and Paldon invited Alice to see a documentary about a very young Tibetan boy who left his family to live in India, much as she herself did.  The two plan to continue their formal mentorship through Paldon’s senior year and, more informally, beyond.  Students who qualify for Girls Write Now as freshmen often have the same mentor during their entire high school years.

In the short term, Alice is encouraging Paldon to apply to the Sarah Lawrence summer writing program.  Next year, she will help Paldon through the college essay process. (Girls Write Now gets 100 percent of its seniors into college).  Paldon’s long-term goal since joining:  to become an investigative reporter focusing on human rights.  Her aunt tells her “you can’t just be an activist; you need knowledge behind what you say.”  But her aunt, a registered nurse who emigrated from Tibet and put herself through college, also tells her a nursing career might provide more stability.

Coming up very soon, a fact that makes Paldon nervous, is a public reading.  During the four months of spring, Girls Write Now presents a series of widely publicized readings sponsored by major publishing houses to showcase the best of the students' work. The final CHAPTERS event, also serves as the year’s “graduation,” and the work is published in an anthology.  To an audience of more than 200, Paldon and Alice will read their creation, an essay with the provocative title “No One Can Get Diarrhea.”  Written in alternating paragraphs, it contrasts Paldon’s current household, even more crowded since the arrival of new relatives, with Alice’s memories of her more spacious and quieter childhood home.  It demonstrates how much they have learned to appreciate the differences and similarities in each of their cultures.

By the time these public readings take place, the girls have produced a portfolio of varied writings, pursuing an extremely rigorous curriculum that includes genre workshops in fiction, memoir, screen- or playwriting and journalism, as well as, more recently, “dorkshops” (digital media-based writing workshops).  Now in its fifteenth year, Girls Write Now has been recognized twice by the White House as one of the top afterschool arts programs in the country.  Most of its volunteer mentors are quite a bit younger than Alice, though all are accomplished professional writers.  Paldon’s memoir about leaving Tibet and coming to the United States, “Plunged into the Wonders of the World,” went through many drafts before being submitted for a Scholastic Art and Writing Award.  (Girls Write Now has a great track record for these awards, its students having won more than 100 since 2006.)

“Alice has taught me courage, to believe in myself, to fight for what I want,” Paldon says.  “Paldon added a dimension to my life,” says Alice.  “I’m the mother of five grown children, who live geographically far apart.  To be of use to a younger person who can absorb, appreciate, and transform the writing is a wonderful feeling.”

Paldon has traveled further, both in distance and in culture, than most other young women.  It is not unusual for her to get up at 4 am to work on her journal or drafts of her writing.  On top of her Tibet activism, she also volunteers once a week helping visually impaired seniors in their homes.  Her determination is inspirational.  She is lucky to have found Girls Write Now, which nourishes her talents and her self-confidence to pursue her goals.

Arriving in Pakistan, you wonder: will the mobile phones be working?  The Interior Ministry turns off mobile phone systems as a counter-terrorism measure on days of religious, ethnic, or political tension. The “haves” have land-lines; the “have-nots” do without communication.

As the plane begins its descent; Karachi awakens to another stressful day.  I am here for a quintessential Pakistani family function: a wedding. These days the bridegroom’s motor car procession arrives with security escorts. As we head home well after midnight, my cousin’s wife warns me to hide my necklace and handbag. There’s tension at the stop lights, particularly when we see two riders on a motorcycle—often the setting for a hold-up.  But we make it home without incident. 

So what happened to the Pakistan where we biked the streets and drove back unescorted from parties on the beach?      

We know the endless analyses. The country started with an impossible geographical division, West and East divided by 1,000 miles of India; immediate war with India over Kashmir (water source for the entire region); the military’s rise, as our defender, protector, and eventual ruler, and  the military’s alliance with the United States and Saudi Arabia—all of this pitted against the Soviet Union, then at war in Afghanistan. Then Pakistan’s decline into an unholy mix of Wahhabi religious extremism, terrorism, and misogyny, with drug trafficking from poppies grown in Afghanistan.           

Countering this descent into Hades, the normal, decent citizens of Pakistan continually assert themselves. They elected the first woman prime minister in the Muslim world in 1988 and were  poised to re-elect Benazir Bhutto in 2008, when she was assassinated, allegedly by the Taliban in  December of 2007.  When, in 2007, the fourth military dictator dismissed the chief justice, a nonviolent, multiparty coalition of lawyers led a relentless campaign until he was restored  in 2009. An occupation of the tourist valley of Swat by Taliban militants was uprooted by an army operation in 2009, ordered by parliament at the behest of activists outraged by the Taliban’s public flogging of a young girl. Senior politicians denounced the abuse of minorities under the blasphemy laws, despite mortal danger to themselves:  Governor Punjab Salman Taseer was murdered by his Islamist bodyguard; Minister for Minorities Shahbaz Bhatti was killed as he left his mother’s home. “[But] the pathetic liberals have not supported the liberal politicians,” fumes talk show host Tammy Haq.

People ask which Pakistan is the real one, and which is winning? The answer is: Both are real. And  there are no winners.    

As with the rise of European fascism, there must be an enemy within. In Pakistan the list of enemies within is expanding; now to an increasingly oppressed majority. First the Ahmaddiyas, a sect declared non-Muslim in the 1970s, then the Christians, now the Shia. But the Shia are approximately 20 percent of Pakistan’s population.  Hazaras, who are Shia Muslims, have been targeted; pilgrims dragged off buses on their way to Iran and summarily executed, bombs at Shia mosques, Shia doctors killed. “The Shia don’t understand why they are being killed… and why Iran is not helping them,” says attorney Hasnain Naqvee.

Nevertheless, civic groups and women legislators are moving on with a rights-based development agenda. The assembly led by a woman speaker, has pushed through an impressive legislative record on women’s rights including the 2010 Protection Against Harassment Act  and the 2012 Domestic Violence Bill. “For litigators on women’s rights and family law this has been most helpful,” says Rayhab Khan, a young lawyer in Islamabad’s family courts. “[Implementing such] laws . . .  will encourage women to come forward.”

Yet the infrastructure of the state itself is stagnating, if not in outright decay.  In a country of 176 million,  “According to the Federal Bureau of Revenue, there are only 1.8 million registered tax IDs and only 0.8 million tax payers,” complains tax accountant Imran Afzal. State institutions live  off development aid, the underground  or illegal economy, and rapacious rents and kickbacks.  The media are shining a spotlight on investigations and resulting court cases, but accountability has become a new weapon manipulated to settle scores.      

More worrisome,  state-owned air transport, rail, post, emergency services, electricity, and energy, are all in dangerous decline.  Flying with the national carrier, PIA, is a game of chance, even for the Minister of Defense under whose charge the airline operates. 

On March 16, 2013, this parliament and administration became Pakistan’s first elected government to complete its tenure without ending in an army coup. Nevertheless, with base data on employment not available beyond 2008/2009, the government cannot show voters the impact of its policies on employment.  

Education and jobs remain the ladders out of poverty, yet both are major challenges for girls and women, due to lack of affordable, secure transport.  The most visible example is Malala Yousafzai, shot in the head by the Taliban who boarded her undefended school bus.  But thousands of Malalas do go to school and to work everyday, struggling with unlicensed private transport arrangements.  “We have lots of flyways and highways built by local and provincial governments for motorists; [but] no national investment in a public transport system,” says Kaiser Bengali, an economist.  The victim is urban air quality.  Lahore, once famous for its restorative climate, is now enveloped in smog. Despite a pre-electoral hurried completion of the first public bus route for Lahore, many of the recommendations of the Clean Air Commission set up by the Lahore High Court in 2003 still await implementation.  

Pakistanis live their lives in this cauldron. Yet people still hustle to work, bustle the children to school on whatever transport is available, use the diminishing gas during the time it’s on to cook the family meal.  Private institutions, including religious groups, only partially bridge the infrastructure gaps. 

The microfinance sector currently serves 2.5 million households annually, according to Khushhali Bank. The most successful development model has been the Rural Support Program Network with an established outreach to 4.7 million households. An additional 5.5 million families are supported by a new federal social welfare program, the Benazir Income Support Program, modeled on Brazil’s Bolsa Familia, providing stipends to the woman of the household who must register for a national ID card.  Its main benefit has been a registration of women voters; women now being over 40 percent of the electorate.

It is in this grassroots social development that enterprising  young women are forging their way.  Maryam Farooq is a social mobilizer with Bunyad Foundation, a literacy and rural development organization in Punjab.  She received the chief minister’s prize for her Anti-Dengue campaign, but her ambitions are larger: “The youth of Pakistan is distributed in different parties,” she says, “ we need a youth party with people from diverse social groups, different religions, and culture, all on the basis of equality.”  

Anila Khan, a Pashtun educator working with Concern for Children in one of Karachi’s largest slum colonies, is putting herself through an MBA while working full time; facing the same social dilemma of girls everywhere. “Till I complete my MBA I am not thinking of marriage; but the boys of my generation have not changed their attitudes about the kind of partner they are seeking; only us girls have become more ambitious.”     

Are these hard-working, educated, young women to be left to the Taliban’s mercies as the United States and NATO proceed with the  2014 planned withdrawal? How to leave without surrender to fascists?  

“The Taliban are not defeated," notes Professor Vali Nasr, dean of SAIS at John Hopkins and expert on the region. "They will take over swaths of Afghanistan…[and] regroup northwards.” The goal for U.S. regional policy is to encourage an alternative ideology within mainstream Sunni Islam.  The key is Pakistan, “it can create some push-back against this Wahhabi mentality; with the more moderate Barelvi base” says Nasr. Hence the importance of the next national and provincial governments’ ability to balance the religious mix. This time Islamists, including Wahhabi sympathizers, are running for office.  

Crucial cards in the upcoming national elections May 11, 2013, have been played, the interim caretakers are retired judges and journalists underscoring the need for transparency. Expectations are that neither the outgoing governing party, the secular leftist PPP (Pakistan People’s Party) nor the front-runner center-right PML [N] (Pakistan Muslim League) can govern without coalitions.  They have developed these coalition-building skills these past five years. Despite the turbulence, in the midst of a brutal war on terror, the worst floods in history, earthquakes, and dengue epidemics,  the politicians have managed to pull through the full term of an elected parliament—in Pakistan, a first, and no mean feat. 

Italy is still struggling post election to form its 62nd coalition government. Despite battling fascism, organized crime, war and occupation, corrupt politics, and an omnipresent religion, Italy is Europe’s third largest economy. One key factor for this is that after defeating and prosecuting the fascists, the United States showed leadership in establishing European regional structures for lasting peace and prosperity. 

With the right kind of engagement from the United States and Nato allies—the fostering of regional economic integration in South-West Asia—Pakistan could be Italy; celebrities, spoilers and indictees included.

The title is from a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Pakistan’s late poet laureate.

When a superior non-commissioned officer raped Brian K. Lewis, former petty officer third class, U.S. Navy, his command ordered him not to report the crime. Lewis, the first man to ever testify about military sexual assault, bravely shared his story during the Senate Armed Services Committee's Personnel Subcommittee Hearing in mid-March, on behalf of all male survivors.

Rebekah Havrilla, a former Army sergeant and now an advocate at the Service Women’s Action Network, was another survivor who spoke during the Senate hearing.  After she was raped by a service member, she testified that she was terrified of the repercussions of reporting it. When she finally decided to report, she found the process was re-victimizing. It ended in no charges for her rapist.

Over the past two months, I have attended three high level hearings on military sexual assault, a crime that 19,000 soldiers experience annually. Also in March, I attended the presentation of an annual report on sexual assault in the military academies given to the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS).

While sexual assault is an under-reported crime in the civilian world for many reasons, military survivors face additional barriers. While new programs in the military mean survivors can have access to victim advocates and trained military lawyers, ultimately, it is up to their commander to decide the verdict, or to overturn it.

At each of the three recent hearings, survivors and survivor advocates said their main recommendation for stopping military sexual assault is the creation of an independent system for reporting and trying cases so that more people can safely report crimes, more perpetrators will be convicted, and there will be a real deterrent for would-be assailants.

As it stands, now, too often the chain of command includes the rapist or his friends, and, the commanders neither are impartial judges of the situation nor are they trained legal experts. As a result, less than 10 percent of the reported perpetrators are prosecuted and only 2 percent of those ends in convictions.

The military disagrees with this recommendation.  At each hearing, military leaders openly acknowledged that sexual violence is a problem, stated that the military has “zero tolerance” for it, and talked about how they now have more prevention and training initiatives in place. But they also said they will not change the reporting and prosecution process because they believe it will prevent the maintenance of “good order and discipline.”

The story was not much different at the DACOWITS event. Nathan Galbreath, the senior executive advisor of accountably and assessment, shared that reports of sexual assault at the three military academies were higher than in the past and then primarily discussed new prevention efforts. When someone asked him what kind of accountability there is for the crimes, he refocused the discussion to prevention, saying, “We cannot prosecute our way out of this.”

While the military’s stance is frustrating, I have been heartened by the response of the women of Congress, especially by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who organized the Senate hearing within days of becoming the chair of the Personnel Subcommittee. This was the first Senate hearing on the topic in nearly 10 years.

Senator Gillibrand passionately called out the military leaders who testified at the hearing, saying, “I appreciate the work you’re doing, but it’s not enough.”

When the military leaders defended the command’s authority by saying it constitutes “good order and discipline,” she retorted, “I don’t know how you can say having 19,000 sexual assault cases a year is discipline and order. It is the exact opposite of discipline and order.”

She brought up a recent egregious case where Air Force pilot Lieutenant Colonel James Wilkerson was found guilty of aggravated sexual assault in November by an all-male jury at Aviano Air Base in Italy. Then, Lieutenant General Craig A. Franklin, commander of the Third Air Force in Europe, ordered his release from prison and revoked the conviction without explanation.

Gillibrand asked Lieutenant General Richard C. Harding (USAF) if justice was served in this case. He could not give a direct answer and Gillibrand shot back saying, “If you are the victim in that case, to have gone through eight months of testimony, of providing evidence, I can assure you, she did not believe justice was done.”

To ensure that justice is served in more cases, Representatives Jackie Speier (D-CA), Bruce Braley (D-IA), and Patrick Meehan (R-PA). recently introduced legislation in the House that would remove military commanders’ power to overturn legal decisions or lessen sentences. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) plans to introduce similar legislation in the Senate.

Congresswoman Speier also will soon reintroduce her bill, the Sexual Assault Training Oversight and Prevention Act (the STOP Act), to create an impartial office within the military to handle cases of rape and sexual assault outside of the chain of command.

Contact your representatives and encourage them to support the Military Judicial Reform Act of 2013 now and the other pieces of legislation once they are introduced. If the military continues to refuse to listen to the advice of survivors and advocates, it is up to us to ensure that Congress passes legislation that makes them listen.

The commentary has been corrected as of 3 PM, March 26, 2013.

In the beginning of March 2013, Mashable posted a viral video exposing the extent of U.S. economic inequality. The narrator, Mashable senior editor Charlie White, recreates a chart by a Harvard Business School professor and economist that exposed a staggering revelation of what 5,000 respondents idealize, perceive and know about wealth distribution. White’s video runs about six and a half minutes and follows the research of Professor Michael I. Norton on how both ideals and perception of inequality lag far behind the shocking reality. The vast preponderance of American wealth—40 percent—is in the hands of the top one percent while “the bottom 80 percent [only] has seven percent [of wealth] between them,” White laments. 

In a city like New York, if you have your eyes open and headphones tucked away, you can easily observe deepening inequality. Generally, New Yorkers perceive these changes as part of rampant gentrification—where rents and real estate prices rise as gentry who can afford more move into a neighborhood. But the reality reflects a combination of public cuts, biased development policy and shifting investment citywide. Essentially, our perception of gentrification is out of step with the reality of gentrification.

A new film called "My Brooklyn" (2012) by director Kelly Anderson and producer Allison Lirish Dean offers a broader analysis of the many factors behind gentrification. The film focuses on how exploitative real estate policy radically altered the cultural and physical landscape of the Fulton Mall area of Downtown Brooklyn and how community organizers struggle for representation among a web of government and development agencies conspiring to “improve” New York City.

Brooklyn—the star of "My Brooklyn"—is home to some of the most rapidly gentrifying areas in the United States. According to a recent study, Brooklyn is  also the second most expensive place to live in the United States, with Manhattan at number one, and even formerly less fashionable Queens at number five.  Skyrocketing rents throughout the New York City have had a disproportionate effect on native New Yorkers and particularly people of color and women.  Although Anderson and Dean’s film does not explicitly address the relationship between housing development and women, the film features a number of women advocates in front and behind the scenes dealing with the fall out of gentrification. The fact is that changing policy in the New York City housing market—skillfully addressed in the film—in favor of luxury housing development and the gradual dissolution of affordable housing are driving gentrification. In a rare article exclusively on the subject of women and housing in NYC, Angeli R. Rasbury in Forbes magazine, of all places (“New York City is Making Women and Children Homeless,” 2012), presents the connection between increasing homelessness among women, eliminated local subsidy programs and limited city and state funding towards low-income housing.  New York City currently leads the nation in a disturbing trend of unprecedented rates of homelessness, and it stands to reason that women and children of color, especially black families, are disproportionately affected.

"My Brooklyn" engages this intersection of race, class and gender in housing policy in a palatable yet bold manner.  As a resident of New York City for 25 years director Kelly Anderson has worked, lived, and loved in the borough. For Anderson, narrator of the documentary, the shock of rapidly escalating rent hits close to home as a single woman and professional raising a young daughter—though she acknowledges being a white woman of some means offers distinct privilege. Anderson began her career as an activist interested in social justice then gravitated from journalism to documentary film.

Anderson first teamed up with Allison Lirish Dean, also a white woman of some means, when Dean decided to make a small film called "Someplace Like Home" (2008) about strident and successful community organizing in Downtown Brooklyn and Fort Green.  Dean, who holds a masters in urban/regional planning coupled with a background in journalism and public radio, decided to make "Someplace" in response to the 2004 Downtown Brooklyn Redevelopment Plan. The plan covertly rezoned a traditionally commercial area for residential use and purported job creation—jobs that generally never came to fruition.

"Someplace" was funded by the community organization Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE) and follows its successful struggle to protect an abolitionist residence and prevent three families from homeless ordinance by eminent domain. According to FUREE senior organizer Lucas Shapiro, the organization was originally founded by “fifteen women who were living on public assistance [as] a welfare rights organization to expand opportunity for people to escape poverty through job training, career advancement [and the like].” Gradually their work included affordable childcare and youth programming, then spilled over into economic and racial justice issues. The organization is made up almost entirely of women of color living in Downtown Brooklyn and surrounding areas. While "Someplace" highlights FUREE's persistent fight for a seat at the table at city development meetings and challenge to specific housing cases, "My Brooklyn" is intended as a follow up to examine the 2004 plan that allowed for rezoning of 60 square blocks of Downtown Brooklyn for luxury high-rises and the changing face of Fulton Mall.

Arguably the two most compelling and infuriating segments of "My Brooklyn" are in  a  Fort Green farmer’s market and a sobering lesson from MIT Professor Craig Wilder. Before its systematic destruction, Fulton Mall, as Anderson reveals, was the third most lucrative shopping area in New York City behind Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue in Manhattan. However, Fulton Mall served predominantly African American, African and Caribbean patrons plus other people of color. In the farmer’s market segment, Anderson films responses from a number of seemingly well healed white liberals on the ‘value’ of Fulton Mall. Their responses are typical of contemporary colorblind representations of racism in America today, in which race is all but omitted from the discussion and yet the bias of racial prejudice permeates all rationalizations of perceived ‘value.’ One interview subject actually says, “I think it’s a really weird space and I don’t know how to interact with it and I think they should just make it go away”—other interviews are even more denigrating.

MIT Professor Craig Wilder then comes to the screen providing a compelling juxtaposition to the colorblind racism exposed moments earlier. Wilder was born and raised in Bedford Stuyvesant and still owns a home in the community. He calmly explains the historical and systemic dimensions of housing in America that was racially biased from the start, with the most definitive factor dividing post-New Deal communities that would receive federal subsidies for home ownership from those that would not as relative to the presence of black residents.  If five percent or more black people lived in a neighborhood they would be “red lined” and barred from receiving financial investment like mortgages; so by the 1970s, half a million whites moved out of Brooklyn into the suburbs where they could receive subsidies for home ownership and build wealth. Subsequently public services were withdrawn and black communities were left to fend for themselves. As Wilder emphasizes, to their credit black communities survived and even thrived with hardly any social safety net and souring crime—see Fulton Mall. Accordingly, Wilder argues that current and past housing policy is a deliberate and systemic action to isolate or arbitrarily uproot communities of color for the benefit of developers and a prejudiced social order.

Through solid storytelling and investigation by Anderson and Dean (with a wonderful ad hoc community of social justice advocates), "My Brooklyn" provides a succinct and engaging means to understand the systemic factors behind gentrification. The revelation of an incestuous network of private and public investment driving development allows the viewer to push past liberal fatigue, lingering guilt, or inert anger. Observing the work of FUREE also provides a glimpse of the necessary and painstaking work of community action to challenge policy. Indeed, the filmmakers have plans to use the film as a social justice tool in the city. However, "My Brooklyn" is also a stirring love letter to the borough of Brooklyn replete with vintage photography by Jamel Shabazz of Back in the Days fame, a lively soundtrack, and enriching oral testimony from Brooklyn residents. Anderson and Dean strive to convey the vibrant culture once enshrined in the bustling streets of Downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall from store owners to the loyal patrons who supported a successful local economy. Downtown Brooklyn today is a shell of its former self dwarfed by a huddle of luxury high-rise buildings after 12 years of the Bloomberg era development has broken the beautiful and still beating heart of a city.

In the past, Rob Portman has supported the federal Defense of Marriage Act, favored a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and backed legislation prohibiting gay couples in Washington, D.C., from adopting.

Now, the conservative Republican senator from Ohio has changed his mind. “I have come to believe that if two people are prepared to make a lifetime commitment to love and care for each other in good times and in bad, the government shouldn’t deny them the opportunity to get married,” he wrote in the Columbus Dispatch.

Discovering his son Will is gay “led me to think through my position in a much deeper way,” he said.

I would never question the sincerity of Portman’s change of heart or the thoughtfulness that made him reverse his personal and political opinions. When he said, “We should encourage people to make long-term commitments to each other and build families, so as to foster strong, stable communities and promote personal responsibility,” I believe him.

But I would ask why it took the concerns of someone in his immediate family to move him. For some in Portman’s party, even his family’s truth was no reason to make a policy switch. For Portman, it was shared bloodlines that did the trick.

Empathy for others is not, it seems, a valued quality, especially that which might cross differences in gender or race, economic status or geography—or sexual identity. When President Obama listed it as a pre-requisite for the person he would appoint to replace Justice David H. Souter on the Supreme Court in 2009, he was ridiculed and criticized, as though judges who put themselves, if only for a moment, in someone else’s shoes replace respect for the law with sentimentality and softness, making up legal precedent on the spot.

The president’s choice, Sonia Sotomayor, spent much of her confirmation hearings backing away from any hint of the concept of empathy, saying that “judges can’t rely on what’s in their heart,” as though anyone reading her rulings could come to the conclusion that her rough Bronx upbringing hindered rather than enhanced lessons learned at Princeton and Yale law school.

One of Portman’s fellow Republican conservatives, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, grilled Sotomayor and other judicial candidates on the point, even when Obama used other terms to describe his desire for judges who understand how the law affects ordinary people. “It seems to be calling again for judges to be less committed to fidelity to the law and calling for them to reach decisions that somehow endeavor to decide who ought to win,” Sessions told The New York Times.

Curiously, in the current debate, empathy is only a problem when it’s shown toward the less powerful. Does that mean all the cases decided and laws passed in favor of corporations show common sense and legal impartiality?

Portman’s public change of heart makes me wonder where those seeking public office draw the line – at the border of their districts, their blocks, their front doors? If a first cousin needed help to pay for food or medical care, would that be the thing that finally stopped a politician scoring points by demonizing people who cash a government check?

When some Southern lawmakers who welcomed federal aid after Hurricane Katrina balked at approving reciprocal funds for Northeast victims of Sandy, it put literal boundaries on empathy.

The inability to appreciate the life experience of others unfortunately seeps into other parts of our culture, illustrated recently by an offensive Tweet that used a 9-year-old Oscar-nominated African American actress to make a dubious point. When the pranksters at The Onion’s satirical news site named Quvenzhane Wallis in a quip because, presumably, they thought no one could possibly think of her in such a disgusting context, they failed to acknowledge that black women and girls have routinely been insulted, demeaned and sexualized. If not the target, Wallis was collateral damage, continuing that unfortunate and sad pattern.

Those who objected to the site’s eventual apology defended satire that fell flat, choosing instead to stand on their own privilege, a luxury that allowed them to ignore history and the people who indeed “got” the joke – they get it every day – but didn’t like it. Wholeheartedly but without heart they forged ahead, when a little empathy would have helped The Onion and its defenders remove their cultural blinders.

In Steubenville, Ohio, where two high school football players have been found guilty of sexually assaulting a drunken 16-year-old girl, text messages and photos detailed incidents no one thought to stop from happening. It’s as though not one observer thought of the girl as a person worthy of consideration or care. That the perpetrators and witnesses were all teens means that empathy is not among the lessons at least some young people are absorbing.

Of course, you can come up with just as many examples of small kindnesses doled out and exchanged among neighbors and strangers. But too many headline cases point to a prevailing philosophy to hunker down, close ranks and ration emotion, conserving it for those close to us, in belief if not blood. It’s certainly easier to push away people and things we don’t understand, label them the other and figure they deserve everything they do and don’t get.

It may be progress that holding that view could get you into trouble, as GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney discovered when his disparaging comments about the 47 percent of the American people who don’t take responsibility for their lives were videotaped and leaked by, it turns out, a bartender at a high-dollar fund-raiser. A little empathy toward the folks pouring the wine and clearing dirty dishes would have saved Romney a lot of trouble and maybe an election.

Perhaps people are realizing that imagining oneself in another's place is a sign of strength. Despite Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing demurrals – since then somewhat belied by her searching questions from the bench – opening your heart can open your mind, as well.

For my own mother, it came in the form of an auto-immune illness when she was in her early 40s and I was in junior high school.

She would force herself to wake up with us in the morning to participate in the flurry of breakfast scarfing and lunch packing before we headed off to school for the day, and then crawl back into bed again once we were out of sight.

Part of how my mom got so sick is that she drove her immune system into the ground by constantly overriding its signals—i.e. “leaning in” when her body was telling her that it needed to “lean out,” rest, and heal for a bit. 

She mostly hid the exhaustion, the chemical sensitivity, the aching joints, the migraine headaches caused by chronic fatigue syndrome, a disease that affects nearly 1 million Americans each year (experts believe four times as many women than men suffer from it). She didn’t want her kids to grow up thinking they had a sick mom.

I spoke with hundreds of young women while researching my first book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How Perfection is Harming Young Women, and found that a shocking number of them had similar stories. One remembered when her mother, a nurse who juggled raising five children with fulltime work, simply disappeared for a month; the daughter was told that her mother went on “a vacation,” but later found out that she was hospitalized for mental health issues. Another told me about her mother’s battle with stress-induced stomach problems, made worse by her debt worries. Others spoke of eating disorders, cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.

In other words, there is a generation of young women aching into their own adult choices, painfully aware of the ways in which our own mothers leaned so far in that they compromised their own health. They refused to embrace the wisdom of, not just temporal, but physical limitations. Our mothers took care of business and us, while refusing to take care of themselves; the message was in the modeling: nurture everybody…except yourself.  

Lest one think these are just the ailments of the kinds of women who have been obsessively discussing Sandberg’s book—those with relative privilege—think again. The health risks associated with being a woman who does too much are even more pronounced for women of color. According to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, women of color fare far worse than white women across a broad range of health indexes, including insurance coverage and late or no prenatal care. According to another recent study, black women between the ages of 49 and 55 were 7.5 years biologically “older” than white women. Indicators of perceived stress and poverty accounted for 27 percent of this difference.

Women suffer disproportionately from a range of ailments related to stress. According to a recent study,
1 in 12 women will suffer from an autoimmune illness in her lifetime. Women are more than 2.5 times as likely to suffer from depression than men and 2 times as likely to suffer from anxiety.

In part these disparities may be because men have higher androgen levels than women. According to Paul J. Rosch, MD, FACP, president of the American Institute of Stress (AIS), “Women tend to react to stress differently than men. They don’t respond with the fight or flight response — they’re more apt to negotiate.”

I am not blaming women, or mothers (God knows they get enough blame in the media these days), for their illnesses. But it would be shortsighted for us to continue to feed the beast of this “lean in” debate without acknowledging the health risks. Trying to be everything to all people (what Dr. Rosch might call “negotiating”) is physically dangerous, particularly in a country with such a perilous lack of structural support—child and health care, maternity and paternity leave, among much more.

Perfectionist delusions plus structural inadequacies create stress and stress creates disease; the math is simple and, yet, it still seems to somehow add up to a leadership style, rather than a health care crisis, in our popular debate.

At long last, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was reauthorized last week and signed into law by President Barack Obama. In its newest incarnation the act calls for greater inclusion for lesbian victims in same-sex relationships, for undocumented immigrants, and for Native American women living on reservations. Programs funded by VAWA allow for the continuation of vital training programs, such as those that educate and transform police forces, judges, and courtrooms, as well as educational measures that change cultural norms among boys at an early age, and help to stop the cycle of victims becoming abusers.

The work accomplished by VAWA over the past two decades has contributed to a 64 percent decrease in violence against women and girls since 2010, a striking decline that was announced by the U.S. Justice Department this week. That alone would seem to be reason enough for advocates to sit back and bask in their victory. But while women in the United States have successfully saved and expanded funding and services through VAWA, many others around the world are forging their own solutions.

On the edge of the East River in New York City’s United Nations headquarters, VAWA was just one of hundreds of important measures being celebrated in the ongoing fight against violence and girls last Friday, when more than 5,000 advocates for women and girls met for annual meetings held by the United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women.

“I presented at the Academy Awards recently,” said actress and Avon Foundation Ambassador Salma Hayek Pinault, “and I wasn’t half as nervous there…as I am today.”

Pinault, who said that she’d been an anti-domestic violence activist since the age of 17, was presenting at quite another kind of awards ceremony on that rainy Friday afternoon. The Second Annual Avon Communications Awards, co-sponsored by Futures Without Violence (where this writer has done editing work), Liberian Ambassador Marjon V. Kamara, and the NGO Committee on the Status of Women, was there to honor the five top communications innovators chosen from a pool of 426 campaigns in 46 countries, all of whom had managed to find brave, new ways to educate and empower their communities.

In Tanzania, for example, the “Champion Project” is a five-year video campaign that calls on men to educate other men in their work places, at home, and in health facilities – showing them how to go from “bystanders to champions” in the fight against violence and HIV infection.

In Pakistan, a 22-year-old software engineer calling herself a “dreamer and a doer” created “Take Back the Tech!” which helps to strengthen women’s use of technology, online tools, and social media, and offers technical assistance to other organizations working to combat violence against women. 

Samajhdari, a radio program in Nepal launched with the support of a three-year grant from the UN Trust Fund to End Violence, has reached more than a million listeners every week since its launch in 2006. Some 74 percent of reported cases of women with HIV in Nepal are housewives, many of whom are exposed through marital rape.  The show has sparked public dialogue and helped women to negotiate sexual rights in their own homes.

Communications X-Change, a new digital library, catalogues these and other campaigns to help global advocates “find, share and learn” strategies from around the world.

It’s a good thing VAWA was passed in time for the commission’s meetings. It might have been a little embarrassing for the United States to play host to such a celebration of such global innovation, had it not been reauthorized. Because after all, in this great, big, interconnected world, does it really matter if the battered woman who needs help lives in the Ukraine…or on an Indian Reservation?

Fiction films about a housewife trying to help stray dogs and learning to help herself, an immigrant in Europe telling her daughter back in Cuba about her new life, and a man trying to write a poem while his wife complains about the heat and his son watches a R-rated movie. Documentaries about jazz and friendship, exhibitionism and the life before and after the revolution of a 95-year-old Cuban woman, María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno, whose grandmother was abducted by slave traders.

“I loved making that movie,” acclaimed director Marina Ochoa said in Spanish about her film on the warm and feisty Bueno, "Blanco Es Mi Pelo, Negra Mi Piel" ("White Is My Hair, Black Is My Skin"). “She’s a black woman who was born in Cuba from slaves and I interviewed her because I wanted to show the history of Cuba through the history of a woman. I totally fell in love with her doing this project.”

That film, along with more than 20 others are part of the Cuban Women Filmmakers Showcase in Los Angeles, New York and Miami this March – the first time a group of Cuban women have come to the United States to show their films. Ochoa, the head of the Cuban Women Filmmakers Mediatheque, will come to the screenings and take part in Q&As and panel discussions along with award-winning filmmakers Gloria Rolando and Milena Almira, and acclaimed film and theater actresses, Claudia Rojas.

Ochoa, who says she always wanted to express herself through documentaries, looks forward to coming with these women “to make visible the work of these talented filmmakers,” and meeting with the Americans who do what she does. 

“We can exchange experiences and discuss the problems that affect us as women directors,” she said. “There’s the possibility of getting to know one another and sharing ideas.”

Former Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, an honorary host of the event (others include actresses Susan Sarandon and Annette Bening and director Lisa Cholodenko), values this type of cultural exchange.

“It’s an important affirmation of their work,” she said about the showcase. “I always want to support Latina women doing something creative."

Ruby Lopez co-chairs the Women In Film International Committee, which has partnered with a whole host of other organizations, including the Cuban Women Filmmakers Mediatheque, the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematograficos (ICAIC) and the American Cinematheque, to bring the filmmakers to the three U.S. cities.
Lopez’s organization wants to broaden people’s horizons beyond Hollywood. She appreciates the aesthetic and the personal stories being told in the films in the showcase, she says.

"The Seamstress ("La Costurera") "is a very pretty movie and the visuals are beautifully done,” said Lopez, who enjoyed the animation in this short film, being an animator herself. “It’s one of my favorites.”

Lopez also mentioned Ochoa’s documentary on Bueno and another documentary by Claudia Rojas, "Derecho de Ser" ("Right to Be").

“It focuses on a single character telling her most personal and most painful experience,” Lopez said. “It’s almost like a one-woman show in a field of sunflowers. It’s about expressing yourself and setting yourself free. It’s done in such a creative way – almost like spoken word.”

On March 8, to celebrate International Women’s Day, the series will launch at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. There will be screenings in L. A. through March 12, then in New York March 13-17 and in Miami March 18-25.

Leslie Fields-Cruz handled the programming in New York City. Fields-Cruz, the VP of operations and programming at the National Black Programming Consortium, got involved after she met Luis Notario, the producer/coordinator of the showcase at the Trinidad/Tobago Film Festival. When he told her the filmmakers were coming to L.A., she wanted to make sure they went to other cities.

“I have an interest in making sure that people of color and women’s films are seen in the United States,” she said. “I’ve been to Africa and Korea for these types of things and there’s nothing like artists being able to talk about their work. That exchange of information and stories gets me excited.”

Producer Laura Bickman ("Che," "Traffic"), another honorary host of the showcase, has found that exchange in her trips to Cuba. She has been going there since 2001 to do research for her films.

“Cuba has such a wonderful rich cultural community with incredible musicians and artists and writers,” Bickford said. “Filmmaking there has a very strong tradition.”

Bickford said the filmmakers who have hosted her in Cuba have shown great hospitality and she looks forward to returning the favor. Because of the U.S. embargo, Cuban filmmakers have been isolated and they could use help, she says. 

“Being a filmmaker is just hard no matter what gender you are,” she said. “They are Cubans who found a way to make their voice be heard, which is hard in first world county. It’s amazing what they’ve done.”

Women in media should not have to choose between defending their appearance and keeping their job.

This is the message aspiring women media professionals ought to be receiving, instead of feeling like their news outlets will not protect them from insensitive critics who complain via social media that they don't fit the preferred standard of beauty.

In late November, the nation received an intimate look into the aforementioned dilemma when a Shreveport, Louisiana, meteorologist lost her job after defending her personal appearance on a social media platform. Rhonda Lee, who worked at KTBS, an ABC affiliate station, was harshly criticized by a viewer on the station's Facebook page. He did not approve of Lee, whom he referred to as "the black lady," or her short, tightly coiled hairstyle. She "needs to wear a wig or grow some more hair," the viewer wrote.

Lee responded to his comments by defending her African American ancestry and natural hairstyle. "Women come in all shapes, sizes, nationalities, and levels of beauty," she asserted in her comment response. "Showing little girls that being comfortable in the skin and HAIR God gave me is my contribution to society."  She ended her response by thanking the viewer for watching the station's broadcasts. Station leaders later fired Lee for violating the station's social media policy.

Around the same time last year, a white, plus-size anchor in La Crosse, Wisconsin, received a critical email from a viewer about her weight. Jennifer Livingston of the CBS affiliate WKBT was told she shouldn't "consider [herself] a suitable example for [the] community's young people, girls in particular." After her husband, a fellow WKBT anchor, posted the email to his Facebook page, she received an outpouring of support. Livingston was allowed to respond to her critic on air during an editorial segment. "You know nothing about me but what you see on the outside; and I am much more than a number on a scale," she asserted. Her station fully supported her decision. Her job was never in jeopardy.

The way both situations were handled has been heavily debated in journalism circles and in the court of public opinion. Both women faced criticism from viewers attacking their professional appearance. Some have questioned whether race played a role in the varying outcomes.

"I really think [KTBS management] could have just let me send that post to the guy and let it go, and let that be everyone's teachable moment," Rhonda Lee told me in a phone interview. She went on to say that right after she responded to the viewer, she sent her supervisors a screenshot of her post. Instead of receiving encouragement and reassurance that she took the best course of action, she was told, "Don't do that anymore."

According to a copy of an KTBS email to employees posted on The Huffington Post, Lee's former station's social media policy only allows for "one proper response" to viewer complaints, which must include the contact information of a staffer that can address their concerns. The policy allowed her no leeway to respond to criticism about her personal appearance let alone support from her employer.

Media organizations should ramp up their sensitivity to social media issues and go to greater lengths to shield their employees from personal attacks, especially on-air talent. If management does not want employees defending themselves after being attacked on these platforms – where they are often encouraged to engage their audience – measures should be taken to curb frivolous and hurtful criticisms.

While social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are still evolving as reporting and audience-engaging tools, policies should be in place that outline procedures for dealing with issues before they arise.

News outlets can become more responsive to social media issues by establishing commenting guidelines and actively practicing comment moderation. Just as comment policies are found on many broadcast and print journalism organizations' websites – including NBC News and The New York Times – guidelines and standards should be prominently displayed on their Facebook pages. PBS' Facebook page serves as an ideal example.

I agree with the perspective taken by the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), the largest professional organization for journalists of color in the country. The group issued a statement in support of Lee shortly after her termination. NABJ encouraged media companies to "protect employees on official social media platforms that are used to engage news consumers" and "allow greater latitude when it comes to employees defending themselves in these forums."

All on-air talent face some level of scrutiny, but it seems women anchors and reporters face even more severe attacks about their appearance than that of their male counterparts. Those who do not sport long, straight hair and a slender figure seem to be the most vulnerable to harsh criticism and crude remarks.

Lee and Livingston were both chastised for not reinforcing a stereotype, which is why it's important now more than ever before for media outlets to promote diversity and highlight the reality that not just one standard of beauty exists. Women in the industry should be reassured that they don't have to fit the cookie-cutter image often embraced in mainstream media. KTBS missed an opportunity to express this message when they chose to dismiss Lee.

Lee, who is still "feverishly" looking for employment, said she has been asked before by former employers to make her hair "more pleasing."

"What they're asking me to do is change my complete biology and I don't think that that's fair and I tell them this upfront," she said.

Yes, women journalists – just as their male counterparts – are in the public eye. And as such they assume the role of community watchdogs who present information that help the public make informed decisions. They should not, however, be required to absorb verbal assaults by viewers who feel the need to share hurtful comments about body weight, attire, hair texture or other issues unrelated to the quality of their work. Women journalists have earned the right to assume whatever standard of appearance they choose and deserve to be backed by their employer when that standard is attacked.

This is breaking news.  A warning: it’s grim, but not ignorable. A journalist named Jo Chandler has been reporting it from Papua New Guinea (PNG), for The Global Mail.  She’s an award-winning correspondent who’s risking her life by reporting on witch burnings there. Yes, you heard correctly, the burning alive of women accused of witchcraft.  And no, this is not Europe in the Middle Ages.         

In understated prose, she’s trying to call this dirty secret of PNG to the world’s attention. And I’m going to try my damndest to help her.

“They’re going to cook the sanguma mama!” It was a shout going up from a posse of children on February 6, 2013, as people in PNG’s western highlands provincial capital of Mount Hagen gathered.  Then hundreds of  bystanders watched while Kepari Leniata, the 20-year-old mother of a young baby, was accused of sanguma (witchcraft), then stripped naked by several assailants,  bound, tortured with a hot iron rod that fused her genitals, doused in gasoline, and set alight on a pile of car tires. Spectators stood by as she writhed, screamed, and burned. Some took photographs with their mobile phones.  

A similar scene had occurred two years ago, also in Mount Hagen, when an unidentified woman—as young as 16—was tied to the stake and burned. But this time there are photographs.

Belief in sorcery is still widespread in Papua New Guinea, where 80 percent of the seven million-plus population live in remote areas with little education, surviving on what they grow. The resources-rich country is in the midst of a mining boom, but wealth is held tightly by the few.    

Current  ritual attacks on accused sanguma have broken traditional boundaries. Previously they were hideous enough—vengeful acts of a grieving family for perceived sorcery against a dead relative in a scientifically uneducated culture.          

Now, tradition has morphed into something even more malignant, intensified by liquor and drugs;  by the arrival of cash currency and the jealousies it invites; by poverty clashing with development that propels women out of customary silence, and by men, bitterly, brutally, resentful. Accusations of sanguma are also linked to opportunism and theft, as they were in the Middle Ages—used to deprive women of their land. In general, two thirds of PNG women are constantly exposed to domestic violence; about 50 percent become victims of sexual assaults (in the western highlands, 100 percent of women surveyed said they had been assaulted).         

But only a fraction of sorcery incidents are reported. After the witch burning earlier this month, the public would not cooperate with the police, who, in effect, shrugged. PNG police are underpaid, undereducated, and notoriously corrupt.   

The 2012 Law Reform Commission examination of sorcery-related attacks estimated about 150 cases of violence and killings occur each year in just one province, Simbu—wild, prime coffee country deep in the interior. Reports by UN agencies provide evidence of attacks on accused witches that include being roasted over slow fire, nailed to crosses, hung in public places and beaten to death, locked inside homes and set alight, weighted with stones and thrown into rivers, and hacked to death with machetes.

Horrified citizens in PNG are now finally demanding repeal of the 1971 sorcery act, which criminalized sorcery (thus dignifying the superstition with recognition) and also criminalized vigilantism.  It aimed to acknowledge the tradition’s presence while providing a mechanism to have an accused sorcerer dealt with by the courts.  But the act provided legal refuge for vigilantes to argue sorcery as a mitigating factor, and, when rarely prosecuted—to get off with light sentences or none.  Meanwhile, development agencies are reluctant to touch the issue, because tradition and religion are taboos for donor agencies.  So cultural relativism lives while women are burned to death.    

Even assuming the political will emerges to stop this, it will be years before the terrorism fades. Any who try to intervene are in turn accused. In 2005, Anna Benny, a fearless woman with a reputation for protecting rape victims, tried to defend her sister-in-law from allegations of sorcery. Both women were killed. Police took no action.      

We must do something. This is why we have a women’s movement. Write the PNG embassy and consulates. Write the U.S. State Department. (See addresses below.)Boycott Papua New Guinean coffee. Hold vigils. Tell people. Organize.  

This is woman-hating pure, the sickness itself. No religion masks the superstition here. No hierarchy dictates its rules, as in Saudi Arabia. No authorities order and enforce regulations, as do the Taliban. This is the thing itself—raw, bestial, spontaneous. These are gangs of men tracking and torturing and burning women.     

Yet in the midst of this hell, a woman journalist is risking her life to intervene with her words.          

And I’m just trying to help Jo Chandler get her story out.

Listen to Women's Media Center Live with Robin Morgan at this link. Beginning Saturday, March 2, hear Morgan's interviews with award-winning New York Times columnist Gail Collins, actress Debora Winger on her anti-fracking activism, and Julie Burkhart, who is reopening the Kansas abortion clinic closed since the murder of Dr. George Tiller in 2009.

To demand action on behalf of the PNG women, contact:
Embassy, Independent State of Papua New Guinea
1779 Massachuetts Ave., NW
Washington, D.C. 20036
202-745-3680
info@pngembassy.org

Office of Global Women’s Issues
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
202-647-4000

Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
202-647-4000

It wasn’t long ago that violence against women went virtually unreported in Turkish media. Women’s rights advocates always talk about the “third page”—because that’s where newspapers usually report such crimes, listed formulaically and lumped together with traffic accidents and miscellaneous offences.

“Ten years ago, the media weren’t even talking about violence against women,” said prominent women’s rights advocate Pinar Ilkkaracan, who has been working on this issue for more than 20 years. But following pressure by women's rights organizations, “now there are news outlets that have their own campaigns protesting gender-based violence,” Ilkkaracan said. Turkey's Family Minister Fatma Sahin announced just last year her ministry was beginning to compile comprehensive, consistent data on such violence.

In 2011, Turkish media increased the share of news stories related to women by 82 percent compared to the previous year, Turkey’s Media Monitoring Center (MTM) reported in 2012. Among the more than one million articles discussing women that year were 4,648 on women’s shelters, 3,953 on gender equality and 1,137 on murders of women. Gender violence researchers Asa Elden and Berna Ekal have acknowledged the boost in media coverage of murders of women in the last decade in Turkey, but they say reports tend to focus on a few high-profile cases and ignore day-to-day violence.

Case in point: Sarai Sierra. The harrowing story has headlined newspapers and dominated talk shows in Turkey since she disappeared last month. But much like the reporting of other cases of gender-based violence, the coverage of the murder of the American tourist has been laden with sexism, namely victim blaming.

Her family says Sierra, a 33-year-old mother of two, ventured to Istanbul on January 8 to practice a passion of hers, street photography. The last time they heard from her was the morning of January 21, the day before she was scheduled to return home to New York. She never checked into her flight.

The intense two-week search for Sierra ended on February 2 in the poor seaside neighborhood of Cankurtaran, where police found her body hidden behind a section of the ancient city walls.

While the murder of the young American tourist has garnered attention worldwide, the level of interest it has commanded in Turkey is noteworthy. The National Turkish Police have deemed the investigation into Sierra’s murder, to which they assigned a special task force, their “highest priority,” and the press have been absorbed with every detail of the American tourist’s life. Ilkkaracan, who was included in the Daily Beast's 2011 list of 150 Women Who Shake the World, said the attention is “much more than any Turkish woman would receive”—a major problem in a country where 42 percent of women report experiencing physical or sexual violence at some point in their lifetimes.

I was on the scene in Istanbul the night police identified the woman's body discovered near the tram tracks as Sierra. Every major news organization was there. That weekend, the bodies of four Turkish women who had been murdered by their husbands, partners or boyfriends also were found. Two were in their twenties, and one was killed in Istanbul. Unsurprisingly, the brief coverage they received was tucked away somewhere on the infamous third page.

Though the Sierra murder made headlines for weeks, more often than not the media told her story through a lens that placed the brunt of the blame for the New Yorker’s death on her actions rather than those of her still-unknown assailant. The media immediately questioned, “What business does a mother of two have in Turkey?” and “What kind of woman does this?”

When the press learned of Sierra’s side trips to Amsterdam and Munich, several headlines read, “Was Sierra a drug courier? A spy?” The rumors were so widely reported as fact the Istanbul police chief had to address them. “She was just a tourist,” he told the press.

After police verified the last person known to meet with Sierra was a man named Tarkan K., questions about their relationship and Sierra's marriage and sex life in general began circulating Turkish media. “American Sarai had sex in a bathroom!” one headline announced breathlessly, underlining just how sensational the coverage of the investigation became. Tarkan K.’s lawyer has since come forward and said the two were just friends.

“No one did a thorough journalistic investigation," said Ilkkarcan. "Everyone just reported gossip.”

I witnessed this sort of speculation firsthand. In the pressroom connected to the Public Security Branch, a few of the reporters turned to me, the only American in the bunch. “Why was she staying on Tarlabasi Street?” one asked, referring to a shady back street in the upscale Beyoglu neighborhood. “Why didn’t she stay in a hotel?”

“I live off of Tarlabasi,” I responded, “as do a number of foreigners.”

“Why was she walking around Cankurtaran?” asked another, shaking his head. “Turks know not to do that.”

One Turkish TV reporter, as we were leaving a meeting with a leading police investigator, said, unsmiling, "If you don't answer my calls, I'll just make up the news."

Derek Fahsbender, a friend Sierra met on Instagram in New York, told me he and her family are disgusted by the way the Turkish media have handled the investigation. “What does it really matter?” he asked.

“Why did she come to Turkey alone? Why was she meeting with men? These questions accuse Sierra, the victim, of doing something wrong and, thereby, excuse her killer,” Ilkkaracan said. “This kind of reporting essentially says, ‘She was a bad woman anyway. She was looking for trouble.’”

Despite the protests of Ilkkaracan and other advocates, such marginalization of crimes against women and the excuses made for their overwhelmingly male perpetrators—in the name of honor, “love,” and jealousy, typically—remains the daily practice in Turkish media. Only recently in the western province of Manisa a young man shot a woman to death after she refused to be with him. The headline of that report? “Killed because of unrequited love.”

Learning to manage her juvenile diabetes shaped her life and taught her discipline and self-reliance, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor told a sold-out crowd at a recent Commonwealth Club event in San Francisco.

“The prognosis for my life was not good,” she said. “I had to take full advantage of what I thought would be a limited life span.”

Sotomayor’s new memoir, My Beloved World, opens with her learning to sterilize a needle and give herself insulin shots as a seven-year old. The book details her upbringing in public housing in the South Bronx, her alcoholic father (whose hands shook too much to give her the shots himself), her mother who worked long hours as a nurse, and ultimately her journey to Princeton, Yale Law School and on to become the third woman and first Latina to be appointed to the nation’s highest court.

Often when she reads a memoir, Sotomayor said, she feels she hasn’t learned anything she didn’t already know from the press. In her book, she says she wanted to be candid and expose her insecurities and struggles.

“I wanted readers to be able to say, ‘She’s just like me, and if she can do it, I can do something too,’” Sotomayor said.

Stanford Law School Dean Mary Elizabeth Magill, who interviewed the justice at the Herbst Theater, said that Sotomayor’s challenges – poverty, racism, her father’s alcoholism and early death, not speaking English as a first language, and her illness – must have seemed almost insurmountable at times. Sotomayor said she made it to Princeton, where she graduated summa cum laude, law school at Yale, private practice, federal judgeships and finally the Supreme Court due to her grandmother’s unconditional love, along with her own stubbornness and determination. As a child, Sotomayor says, she got in fights on the playground defending her brother, and she always refused to concede defeat.

“I may have beaten some people up,” she said. “But I also got beaten up a lot because I would never cry uncle. I learned not to give up.”

Her self- reliance and persistence helped her to deal with racist slurs, sexism, and those thinking that she’d taken the spot of someone more deserving when she was at Princeton and Yale.

Sotomayor said she couldn’t discuss affirmative action, since the court has a case pending, but she did say it helped her get into the Ivy League.

“I was given a chance to get to the start of the race, and it made all the difference,” she said.

Growing up, Sotomayor seldom left her neighborhood. Magill asked her if Princeton, which had only started letting in women two years before she went there, seemed like Mars to her.

“What’s the furthest planet?” Sotomayor said. “I felt like I was on Pluto.”

As a little girl, Sotomayor wanted to solve crimes like her fictional heroine Nancy Drew. She felt she had Nancy’s qualities of being logical, focused, and a good observer and listener. But when she was given a pamphlet with the jobs that a diabetic could do, police officer wasn’t on it. After seeing the TV show, "Perry Mason," Sotomayor decided if she couldn’t be a detective like Nancy Drew, she would become a lawyer, which she saw as another way to investigate and fight crimes.

The title of her book, My Beloved World (Sotomayor joked she rejected friends’ suggestion of Wise Latina) comes from a line from the poem “To Puerto Rico (I Return),” by José Gautier Benítez. Sotomayor told Magill she liked the idea of people actually reading poetry from her parents’ birthplace. Their conversation veered from the typical workday of a justice to if she preferred throwing out the first pitch for the Yankees or being a guest on Sesame Street (the latter), to her grandmother’s belief in witchcraft. An audience member asked Sotomayor if she had hesitated over including that in her book. Sotomayor said she had, but wanted to be as frank as possible about her life.

“I wanted to underscore that everyone has . . . something their family does which they wish would be kept secret.”

Sotomayor said she thinks about all her cases from every angle before making the best decision she can, but she said remembering that one side always feels wronged keeps her humble.

“You are not God,” she said. “Hopefully God is more merciful than you can be as a judge. There is always someone who will feel there’s an injustice.”

She found the time in her busy schedule to write the book, Sotomayor said, because she realized her family was getting older, and she wanted to find out their stories. Also, she said, she wanted to remember where she came from.

“I wanted to hold on to the Sonia side of me,” she said. “I told my family and friends if I change in any way they don’t like, I wrote a heavy book, so they could hit me over the head, and say, ‘Remember how you got here.’”

He said it again.

In his recent State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama declared his commitment to equal pay for women in the name of “our wives, our mothers, and daughters.” It was a phrase we also heard during his second inauguration speech. To some, the phrase might sound like a touching affirmation of his position on women’s economic rights, but to keen feminist ears, it is discordant.

At an obvious level, Obama’s opening with “our wives” addresses mostly male members of his audience. The first time I heard it, I flinched, but thought it was an oversight by speechwriters. Now that he’s used it in two speeches, we can assume he means it. The phrase has not passed unremarked: hundreds have tweeted about it, and there is even a petition to ask the White House to end its use.

Now, I do understand the appeal of the wording; I get that the reference to familial roles brings the category “women” closer to home, bathes it in warm tones, and reminds us of Obama’s personal motivations for taking equal pay seriously—we have been told of his grandmother’s travails, his single mother’s struggles. However, it simultaneously accomplishes something quite different: it undermines the idea that women can be political actors detached from their status within households.

When you refer to women only in familial terms, you re-inscribe the notion that the public sphere—the polis—is inherently a male space. As any political theorist will tell you, the very concept of the public sphere was defined in opposition to the household, and in specific opposition to familial obligations. From Aristotle to Locke to Marx to Arendt, the public sphere in the West was that space of free and equal association of unencumbered “citizens.” But, as feminist political theorists note, the very founding of the public sphere was premised on the exclusion of women. It was precisely because women and the enslaved performed the necessary work of running households (feeding, cleaning, tending and mending) that men were “freed” to become public actors.

Clearly those are not the gender divides and roles we live with today, after over a century of women’s struggle for full citizenship in all its forms—voting rights, equal pay, freedom from harassment, bodily integrity. Yet the President’s speechwriters believe that the most appealing rhetorical device remains one that anchors women within their kinship roles, in relation to men. The very use of the word “our” by Obama has force because it implies women “belong” to us. It calls for men to grant women a hearing because women are “theirs.”  But women don't deserve equal pay for equal work simply because we are related to men. Nepotistic thinking is unnecessary.

There is another issue at play here. The phrasing probably helps Obama’s image far more than it helps actual women. Familial, especially fatherly, roles have a charmed status largely when used by men; politicians typically want to be seen as responsible protectors. A female politician calling for action in the name of “our husbands, fathers, and sons” risks diminishing her stature. Her role as wife, in particular, holds little potential to garner authority, given our hierarchical constructions of marriage. Motherhood as a political identity has a mixed record that only a few politicians have managed to successfully navigate; there is a clear tension between appearing too caring and seeming impartial, as ideal citizens are supposed to be.

A male politician, by contrast, is under no burden to prove that he belongs in the public arena, and indeed appears more sympathetic when invoking his familial role and acknowledging or paying tribute to his personal ties. When he calls for action in the name of military “sons and daughters”—one other context in which familial roles are frequently invoked—it is again in his capacity as protector. We see the political cachet Obama can get from invoking his role as the responsible black father, and the unstated racial scripts that this move activates. And we all know the pressure the president faces to appear less aloof.

Let’s also acknowledge we live in a time when people aspire to create expansive and redefined forms of kinship, especially as they live in blended families, single-parent families, and they imagine new forms of gender and sexual identification. We seek to “belong” to multiple people, beyond those whom we were born to or live with; our language of belonging also needs to be expanded. We certainly cannot presume that only those who are our kin are worthy of our attention, our care, our outrage and our commitment.

The language for shaping a future politics should be more creative: I look forward to a world where women don’t have to belong to anyone, and where constricted family roles no longer haunt the sphere of the polis.

The Senate applied the buddy system this week to shepherd anti-human trafficking legislation through the system. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) attached the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) as an amendment to the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).

On Tuesday, Leahy's amendment passed 93 to 5 and VAWA then passed 78 to 22.

If the Senate version becomes law, funding for housing, legal services, counseling and case management will be available for the first time to domestic victims of sex and labor trafficking; it’s estimated that American-born citizens make up 83 percent of sex trafficking cases in the U.S. “Our effort is to stop human trafficking at its roots by supporting both domestic and international efforts to fight against trafficking and to punish its perpetrators,” said  Leahy. “We provide critical resources to help support victims as they rebuild their lives,” he said.

Many updates are included, According to an aide in Leahy’s office:  “It ensures better coordination among federal agencies, between law enforcement and victim service providers, and with foreign countries to work on every facet of this complicated problem. It includes measures to encourage victims to come forward and report this terrible crime, which leads to more prosecutions and help for more victims.”

The TVPA had expired in 2011 and failed to get reauthorized in 2012. Another failed attempt at reauthorization this session would have been devastating to domestic victims of sex trafficking, who saw their best hopes of treatment and prevention programs stalled last year, even though it had enjoyed bipartisan support since first passing in 2000.  A Democratic aide explained the impact after chances of passage disappeared at the end of December: “Funding will continue through the appropriations process [through 2013], but the failure to pass a reauthorization bill" would mean "no updates or improvements to existing programs, like services for domestic trafficking victims.”

If the Senate version is passed in the House, funding would be extended through 2017.

A second, bipartisan trafficking amendment was added to the VAWA also on Tuesday through the offices of Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Rob Portman (R-OH), to protect child sex-trafficking victims.    Another sign of momentum in Congress on combating trafficking is Senator Barbara Boxer’s (D-CA) bill that would “establish the United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking to review federal government policy on human trafficking.”

President Obama had expressed his commitment to stopping domestic trafficking last September in a speech at the Clinton Global Initiative. “The bitter truth is that trafficking also goes on right here, in the United States, " he said.  "It’s the migrant worker unable to pay off the debt to his trafficker. The man lured here with the promise of a job, documents then taken, and forced to work endless hours in a kitchen. The teenage girl, beaten, forced to walk the streets,”   That same month the president signed an executive order stating the United States would “lead by example” and take steps to “ensure that federal contracts are not awarded to companies or nations implicated in trafficking,” the New York Times reported. 

The measure now moves to the House, which remains a brick wall to progress for bipartisan passage. http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/02/senate-vote-vawa.php The trafficking bill reauthorization didn’t pass there in 2012, and worse, a whole new controversy was introduced by religious conservatives, one that will have to be dealt with in 2013. Birth control is the main issue, and demands for a conscience clause could allow providers of services to trafficking victims the opportunity to opt out of providing contraceptives and reproductive health options. Catholics for Choice’s Sarah Hutchison says no conscience clause is needed because an agency can simply refer out if they have a problem offering reproductive healthcare services. “Not letting human trafficking survivors know what’s available is a problem,” she said. Phone calls to a chief “conscience clause” backer Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) were not returned.

Rachel Lloyd, founder of the anti-trafficking organization Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, finds little use for the conscience clause in a program designed to transform victims into survivors and leaders. “I think it’s disgusting” that religious groups have held up the TVPRA because of limitations from the conscience clause, she said. “They‘re holding services hostage and that has implications for vital programs that could fund assistance for domestic trafficking victims.” She added it doesn’t make sense to, on religious grounds, withhold funding to help girls and women who have “gone through awful trauma.”
“That’s not my understanding of faith,” Lloyd said. No matter what religion you are, she said, “it’s my understanding that faith is about caring about the needy and the poor, the oppressed and the marginalized.” 

The version of the bill in the House also weakened the legislation by switching administration of programs from Health and Human Services to the Department Of Justice, ignoring the medical care and counseling trafficking victims need to get their lives together. The activist group Mujeres Talk explained its opposition to this move by the House: “This shifting makes little sense as the Department of Justice, in comparison to the Department of Health and Human Services, is not equipped to deal with the multi-faceted experiences and needs of survivors.” 

Overall, human slavery is characterized by the FBI as “the fastest-growing business of organized crime and the third-largest criminal enterprise in the world.” According to Leahy’s office, “The Polaris Project estimates that there are more than 27 million victims of human trafficking worldwide today.” Advocates are urging House members to take up the Senate version of TVPRA and pass it right away.

Black. Black is really what people mean when they say “sub-Saharan Africa” or rather Black Africa.  In Black Africa people are very unpredictable and the only rhyme or reason to their erratic behavior is tribe. Now, tribe is a euphemism for irrational behavior based on uncivilized bonds.

Undoubtedly, there is a great deal of politics behind an accurate analysis, and words are the beginning of political discourse (check out the title…). For instance notice the sentimental distinction between “tribe” and “ethnicity.” “Tribe” has the old guard Eurocentric connotation attached to it, while “ethnicity” has a more nuanced connotation that could apply to savages and non-savages alike. See, it’s progress!  Nowhere are the politics of language and analysis more obvious than in discourse about Africans.

On March 4, 2013, Kenya will hold national elections across 47 counties with first-time elections for county governors and senators, as well as county representatives and the president. This is the first poll following the nation’s botched elections in December 2007—now under investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The March 2013 election follows the historic August 2010 ratification of a new constitution that decentralized political power, creating the current county system for more representative voting and resource allocation, a bill of rights, and many other positive changes for women (increased land rights and representation in parliament) and the diaspora (dual citizenship), for example.

Since national independence in 1963 Kenya, like much of Africa, South America and Asia, has been in the grips of complex and seemingly mutant strains of neo-colonial power struggles within and outside its balkanized borders. Kenyan political maturity is hampered by flagrant class inequality, ethnic tensions, pervasive sexism, elitist cronyism, aid dependency and all manner of corruption. Nowhere are these maladies more evident than in government. However, despite all of this, Kenya has managed to remain a consistently stable nation within the East African region, given past (and some ongoing) instability in Somalia (which Kenya has engaged in an anti-terrorism ground war since 2011), Rwanda, Burundi, Northern Uganda, eastern DRC and South Sudan.

In December 2007 post-election violence strangled Kenya for over two months following deeply flawed ballot counts and the hasty “re-election” of incumbent president Mwai Kibaki over competitor Raila Odinga—widely seen as the president elect. The tumult was unprecedented with an estimated 1,200 deaths, sexual violence against thousands of women and loss of property or displacement of some 500,000 Kenyans.  As the ICC investigation alleges, the powder keg of violence was systemic and involved government actors, as well as private citizens.  Most of these grievances have not been adequately addressed, though some public reconciliation efforts followed the 2008 establishment of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission of Kenya. Unfortunately, the body is seen as widely ineffective.

Ethnic divisions undoubtedly played a part in that terrible period. However, a myopic analysis of African tensions as consistently “tribal” is an insulting oversimplification of complex factors from a decidedly Western gaze. Nowhere is the adage ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ more applied. A great many modern ethnic tensions, not unlike racial tensions, extend from internal and external constructs of identity enflamed by class inequality and politics. Kenya has 46 percent living in poverty nationwide, and it is not uncommon for a single ethnic group to harbor severe economic disparity within its own community.

Today, years after the horror of Kenya’s very intimate post-election violence, if you survey (as many have) your ‘average’ Kenyan, few are interested in revisiting the violence of 2007 to 2008, though fears remain over unresolved issues of land, class, unemployment, and the like, which portend plausible conflict. What everyone agrees is that the nation needs a free and fair election—a first. Also, citizens are anxious for food security, health care, job security, personal safety, educational opportunity and broader economic development. A great deal hinges on the March 4 national elections at a time when Kenyans openly criticize the authority of corrupt parliamentarians. In fact, determined presidential candidate Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the nation’s first president Jomo Kenyatta and current deputy prime minister, is under investigation by the ICC for crimes against humanity last election cycle. Of the eight presidential candidates, Kenyatta’s main competitor is current Prime Minister Raila Odinga, son of renowned nation-builder Oginga Odinga, who is also accused by some of divisive tactics, though he engages a more broad, proletariat strategy. A reputable poll shows Odinga in the lead, slightly ahead of Kenyatta, arguably the richest man in Kenya with a strong following, both outpacing all other candidates. 

In subsequent elections, one hopes Kenya will follow the lead of Liberia and Malawi and elect a woman head of state. Currently the lone female presidential candidate and parliamentarian, Martha Karua, though an unlikely winner this time, is poised for the post and other women may seek the highest office, as well.

In light of this faltering faith in national leadership many average citizens have taken to social activism and an entrepreneurial spirit.  Community organizing is familiar to many Kenyan communities of the sort exemplified by the likes of the late Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai and emblematic of the success of U.S. President Barack Obama (who Kenyans accept as a distant relative). Small business, though equally familiar to Kenyans through local markets and services, is steadily growing in a nation in search of effective economic solutions. Therefore, terms like ‘peace’ and ‘change’ are part of the national consciousness. In most cases, interest in peace and change is earnest, though the desperation of many people’s lives can easily make ‘peace’ and ‘change’ work a broad enterprise.

In the course of the past five years Kenya has made some obvious strides towards peace beginning with a power-sharing government (brokered in early 2008 by Kofi Annan, former South African First Lady Graca Machel and former Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa). The nation also has many promising elements going for it: a robust and young journalist community; nonviolent rallies and programs aimed at the many unemployed youth for peace; the emergence of nonpartisan crowdsourcing and informational portals like ‘Ushahidi’  and Google Africa’s Kenya Election Hub, respectively; numerous technological advances in communication with 30.8 million mobile users (in a nation of 40 million people) plus millions on Facebook and Twitter; and internationally recognized arts-based peace activists like Boniface Mwangi, who uses photography and street graffiti to question authority, or projects like ‘I am Kenyan’ peace photography. There are countless other everyday heroes, courageous activists, innovative artists and private citizens who work for inclusion and nonviolence in Kenya. The sum of these parts is what makes me hopeful that March 4, 2013, may not lead to national bloodshed.

On February 11, 2013, Kenya held its first ever presidential debate with all eight candidates, estimated as the greatest single audience of any program in Kenyan history broadcast live on television, radio and online.  The state of the art venue and inclusive atmosphere created an open forum to discuss issues of governance, security, ethnicity, education, and leadership complicit in last election’s violence.  Some criticize the debate for its inability to change the minds of voters, though one should appraise it as a success for non-divisive discourse. A second debate is planned on February 25, 2013. The historic event followed a similarly tempered and very well received open message to Kenya for peaceful elections from U.S. President Barack Obama last week. However, there have already been violent clashes attributed to ‘gang’ violence in Nairobi ghettos that bear all the markers of exploited unemployed youth engaged in complex disputes—usually for hire by corrupt politicians. Plus ongoing militarization, intermittent clashes and deaths between indigenous minorities in the southeast and northern Kenya add an ominous tone. Nevertheless, Kenya’s myriad problems are not for lack of faith from the people (though we may falter) or unachievable solutions, but the pathological failure of our political leaders, institutions and those who protect them at home and abroad.

Robin Morgan: In a feminist analysis certainly, everything is connected to everything else.  You recently wrote a stunning piece about the ghastly gang rape in New Delhi and the subsequent demonstrations and how violence against women and the economy were all connected.  I’d love you, please, to talk about the points that you raised.

Vandana Shiva: I’ve been working on how the economy’s changing—globalization, free trade, WTO, the structural adjustment. I’ve made the connections between those purposes and what happens to women in what is called the New Economy. They even call it the Emerging Economy, as if a 10,000-year-old civilization emerges only when it is locked into corporate globalization.

The first level at where violence against women begins is in the very defining of the economy.  Economy means household.  It is what women define both inside the physical households, but also the world, inside the planet as the household.  As long as the principles of management came out of that, they focused on sustenance, livelihoods, mutual giving—of course, within the typical patriarchies all our societies have had.

[With] free trade globalization, the first thing they do is knock out that major sector of women’s economy and, as Marilyn Waring has written in If Women Counted, install a production boundary to calculate growth.

The Gross Domestic Product grows every time you can pull something out of nature and something out of women customers’ economy, which means every time you destroy nature and women’s livelihoods, and production, and creativity, you can call it growth.  It’s created to mobilize finances for the war, and it becomes the dominant number imposed on our world.

I’ve been appointed by the King of Bhutan to an expert group we’ve created because Gross Domestic Product is the wrong measure.  The King of Bhutan said we should be looking at the well-being of our people to measure Gross National Happiness.

At this time, growth measured as Gross Domestic Product is already collapsing world-wide. It collapsed with Wall Street.  It’s collapsing in Europe right now in front of our eyes. and it will collapse in India after a few years.  How long can you sustain an eight or nine percent growth that excludes women as the primary backbone of the economy? That is the first violence.

The second violence is in terms of decision-making and politics.  In so many debates in India we hear, “Oh, we can’t have politics in economics.” But every time they make a decision within a patriarchal model of the economy, it is politics.  It’s politics that basically says, “Only corporations count, only the powerful count, and we’re going to mutate democracy from being, “By the people, of the people, for the people,” into being “By the corporations, of the corporations, for the corporations—and the powerful.”

The convergence of economic and political power further excludes women, but it also creates a class with immunity and impunity, which can do all levels of violence, change laws, and remove protections. There’s rape at every level—rape of the earth, rape of our resources, rape of the economy, and rape of women, which is what this drastic, dramatic tragedy has woken up India to.

Then there are other levels of violence because displaced people are more vulnerable.  I was asked by the National Commission of Women to grapple with what globalization was doing to women in India, in terms of two key factors: water, and food and agriculture. At public hearings around the country, whether in Calcutta or down south, women would speak out boldly about how sexual violence has increased and made them more vulnerable as they were being made economic and ecological refugees.

That is at the very foundation of this new liberal model: everything is a commodity.  Everything is property.  Everything has a price and nothing has value. Added to the traditional patriarchies of societies, that's created what I call a super-virus of patriarchy. When two viruses hybridize, they start to kill.

Basically it’s a bit like climate change.  We’ve had cyclones, but Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy present a different level of violence.  Of course, we know that this is contributed by climate change. We need to start looking at how an economy based on patriarchal fictions—and the corporation is the biggest patriarch in our lives to come—how this patriarchy is combining with traditional patriarchies to unleash even larger violence, both the kind we see on the streets of Delhi and the economic kind, the violence of robbing you of your home, of your foundation.

Our prime minister said recently, it’s these loose-footed migrants that are part of the problem. Because the Delhi rape involved migrants at both ends. The rapists were all living in slums in hugely brutalized conditions, thinking that brutalization is the norm.  The poor girl's father had sold his land because farmers aren’t being allowed to make a living.  Two hundred and seventy thousand Indian farmers have committed suicide.  The rest are hanging on the margins of existence.  He moved to Delhi to load luggage at the airport to be able to survive and send his children to school.

The prime minister just called them loose-footed migrants creating problems. I said, “Mr. Prime Minister, they are a product of your policies.  They are refugees of your economic policies.”  None of these—economics and culture and society—are insulated silos. The patriarchal economic model is becoming the dominant force in our society.  Societies have been reduced to the economy.  Economy has been reduced to the market.  The market has been reduced to what is controlled by finance, capital corporations.  And if all you show is women as commodities, selling other commodities, those images start to further distort already damaged brains.

RM: Isn’t it amazing, Vandana, how when you put something in context—the background of the victim and for that matter of the perpetrators—it changes? Also, I'm reminded of your colleague Ruchira Gupta who wrote a piece in which she pointed out that the commodification of women by the rampant growth of pornography and prostitution sends the message that, in fact, this is what women are for. She connects that to the apparently quite dramatic rise in rape in India.

VS: Hugely dramatic.  Eight hundred percent since the ‘70s and more than 250 percent since India’s economy, was as they say, made "more open" [with globalization]—more open to more violence against women.

RM: From where I sit here in New York, it seems heartening that women in numbers never seen before and accompanied by men as well have been on the streets in not only Delhi but across India.  They haven’t quite made the connections you’re making, but they are on the move protesting violence against women.

What can we do to turn the enormity of this around?  It’s always for example, blown me away, that a woman who is, say, in her fifteenth hour of labor, straining away—the doctor and the nurses and the anesthesiologists are all productive because they are wage labor, but the woman who is actually giving birth is not considered in a productive act.

VS: I think that is the foundational error. Everything that replenishes is treated as not producing at all and everything that’s degrades, everything that depletes, is treated as production.  I call it the creation boundary, which has given us the fiction of growth and the Gross Domestic Product—that destructive acts are creative acts of produce. The really creative acts of nature—of women in their tremendous diversity and amazing ability to juggle 50 jobs, 50 responsibilities—their whole society and economy are treated as unproductive. That, I think, is the most important shift we need to make.

As you know Robin, I come from the part of the Himalayas where it's recognized that women are the main productive force. They go out in the forests [to work] and there's nothing like the rape [that occurs] when you come into the plains where women are no longer considered productive. When I, with my sister, Dr. Meta Shiva, was studying female feticide, we realized that the map of high growth in the patriarchal measure are the same zones with the high levels of extermination of girls—fifty million girls haven't been allowed to be born in the last few decades.

The response in Delhi is beautiful for a number of reasons.

The first, that the younger generation has come. The younger generation was absent from social movements, especially the middle class because they were getting it so good with globalization—the IT jobs that moved to India. They were all seeing themselves as individual consumers, so society did not matter to them. But this rape reminded them that it could have been them coming back from their IT farms, from their phone call service centers.

The second difference is, while we have had a feminist movement in India for a long time, it was only the women. The beauty now is, young men joined. It was a young man who was defending this girl in that bus.  I think for the first time, there’s this new generational solidarity that’s emerging. Those very gutsy young people who are being beaten up and sprayed with tear gas and water canons realized that the state has become militarized. The state itself is a patriarchal institution. It will take time. There will be the hysterical voices saying death sentence, death sentence! But new connections have started to germinate that are really going to make a serious change.

RM: That’s very encouraging.  When you look at the global scale of things, I confess that I look to women not only because we are the majority and that permits more peaceable and more, how shall I say, witty and ingenious new strategies, but also because there’s no area that isn’t a women’s issue.  We spill over into everything if the connections are made.  I definitely see the global women’s movement as the politics of the 21st Century.

VS: We are really living through a period of collapse of all kinds in the patriarchic system.  The collapse of the financial economy they’ve built, a collapse of the eco-systems they have raped.  The UN has recognized that 90 percent of eco-systems are on the verge of collapse, if not already collapsed.  In this period, it’s the creative principle which women bring to bear for the simple reason that they were left to look after the real stuff of life, the goals that really mattered.  So they bring both another world view, another mindset, and other capacities, other skills—which is why I run a grandmother’s university at the new school I created in Dehradun called the Earth University.

RM: I love it.

VS: Ghandi always said a prayer, “Make me more womanly.”  If there is going to be a future for humanity, it will have to be a womanly future. I go to Europe and young men will bring me my books [to sign] and say, "I'm an ecofeminist, Dr. Shiva." That to me is a major, major shift. A shift to a creative economy where women start defining and playing the leadership role but others recognize that there has to be a mind shift.

RM: Whenever I talk to you, I feel both incredibly depressed because one is made yet again to realize the severity of the situation and at the same time, incredibly optimistic because I get from you a validation of everything that we’ve been trying to do and will do more and even better and with more people involved in the future. 

I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your wisdom and your perceptions and for everything that you do.

VS: And Robin, I want to thank you for your vision and leadership and your love.

It is a bit like playing parlor games trying to guess whether or not Hillary Clinton will run for president in 2016. However, I suppose journalists just can’t help but put the ubiquitous question  to Clinton and anyone who has ever written about her.

Having had the question recently asked of me, I’d like to suggest that instead of wondering, “Will she run?” a better question might be, “Why would she or why wouldn’t she run?”

So, here is my take on those questions:

Why Hillary Clinton would run:

Because she may win. She knows what it is like to mount a presidential campaign as the candidate and now she’s prepared (or prepared as anyone can be) for the abusive third party advertisements and press treatment.

She wants to lead with her vision for America. She has been a loyal soldier in Obama’s army, but she would do things differently. This would be her chance.

Why she won’t run:

To work on women and girls’ initiatives full-time. She may be able to do more for the causes she cares about out of office, such as fighting for the rights of women and children. A review of her significant speeches shows her passion for this mission field. As I tell my communications students, we can learn a lot from speeches.

A huge part of her farewell speech as secretary of state was devoted to women and girls’ issues:

. . . it’s not a coincidence that virtually every country that threatens regional and global peace is a place where human rights are in peril or the rule of law is weak.

More specifically, places where women and girls are treated as second-class, marginal human beings. Just ask young Malala from Pakistan. Ask the women of northern Mali who live in fear and can no longer go to school. Ask the women of the Eastern Congo who endure rape as a weapon of war.

And that is the final lever that I want to highlight briefly. Because the jury is in, the evidence is absolutely indisputable: If women and girls everywhere were treated as equal to men in rights, dignity, and opportunity, we would see political and economic progress everywhere. So this is not only a moral issue, which, of course, it is. It is an economic issue and a security issue, and it is the unfinished business of the 21st century. It therefore must be central to U.S. foreign policy.

One of the first things I did as secretary was to elevate the Office of Global Women’s Issues under the first ambassador-at-large, Melanne Verveer. And I’m very pleased that yesterday, the President signed a memorandum making that office permanent.

In the past four years, we’ve made – (applause) – thank you. In the past four years, we’ve made a major push at the United Nations to integrate women in peace and security-building worldwide, and we’ve seen successes in places like Liberia. We’ve urged leaders in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya to recognize women as equal citizens with important contributions to make. We are supporting women entrepreneurs around the world who are creating jobs and driving growth.

Read the whole transcript here. And then, to realize how long these have been among her major concerns, refer back to 1995 when then First Lady Clinton gave a passionate speech on behalf of the rights of women and girls in Beijing, China.

The electorate demands a new drug, so to speak. She isn’t an exciting, new candidate. We are a fickle voting public and Secretary Clinton’s star turn as the secretary of state will recede quickly from the memories of many voters.

I believe that one of the reasons Barack Obama was successful is that we were swept away with his new, fresh face and his compelling story. We know (or think we know) Secretary Clinton’s story, almost by heart!

Why go through it? It is a brutal slog, that running for president gig. And though some of us think she got more right than wrong with her last effort, she still lost. 

Help the party while having a life. Without taking it on as a full-time job, she can help the Democratic nominee more than almost anyone else in the party.

Finish her formal career on a high note. Hillary Clinton has transformed the role of first lady, served as a respected senator, and a highly effective secretary of state. She was the first non-symbolic female to run for president, and she almost won the Democratic nomination.

Before we know it candidates for 2016 will begin to line up and perhaps Secretary Clinton will be among them. OK, I took my shot at the parlor game of the moment. Your turn.

"You can't be what you can't see." One of myriad poignant quotes from "Miss Representation," the documentary on the urgent issue of literal "misrepresentation" of women and girls in media having very real consequences, this one stuck with me for a clear reason: since a young age, I've relied heavily on the inspiration I derive from feminist role models.

However, image is important, and many of my role models come from the pantsuit generation. That represents a new challenge for our time. While I gained inspiration from these women in my childhood, many young women aren't exposed to feminist ideals until later in life. When you're a teenager, being seen as "cool" and "hip" may seem like the highest of goals; so a teenage girl—even one who understands the importance of fighting for women's rights—may not instantly derive inspiration from people who remind you more of your mothers and grandmothers than of your sisters or yourself.

Having role models who are close to us in age allows us to see that having power and influence is not the unique domain of older women. Power and influence must be seen in the hands of young people from diverse backgrounds who can command influence with charisma. To put it in crude terms: in order to reach out to the greatest number of potential young feminists, we have to bring sexy back. That is to say, we need to make the action of standing up for yourself and women's rights worldwide as attractive to young women as the alluring lives of Kim Kardashian or Lady Gaga. With my generation, both indubitably have more name recognition than Susan Rice or even Hillary Clinton. Rice and Clinton kick ass on substance, but in the media environment surrounding young girls, we are trained to seek style. Changing that equation has to start with leaders who we can relate to—not only in how they look, but in how they speak, act, and think.

Movements that are effectively catalyzing change and attracting feminist involvement from the young generation feature young, hip, college- and high school-age role models. Our ability to see ourselves in them is key. Quotes like Hillary Clinton's rousing "Women's rights are human rights" are soundbites worth sharing, one that can be used to spark action globally. But it's contrasting voices toward the same goal that can often be more effective in appealing to my peers. I'm talking about the raw, furious, not-going-to-apologize-for-being-angry, and deeply authentic writing and speaking of women like Soraya Chemaly (a blogger on feminist issues at Huffington Post), Jessica Valenti (founder of feministing.com, which expands awareness for the college and high school-age crowd), and Tavi Gevinson (whose journey from fashion to feminism made for an enthralling TEDxTeen talk). Chemaly, Valenti, and Gevinson are sophisticated, passionate, eloquent...and as their writing shows, they also aren't afraid to swear with every expletive in the book. That isn't a bad thing. When Zooey Deschanel of the show "New Girl" caused a social media mini-maelstrom with her statement, "I want to be a f***ing feminist and wear a f***ing Peter Pan collar. So f***ing what?" I was gleeful; her defiance of tired image stereotypes and pride in being "a f***ing feminist" is likely to draw many of my peers to the cause.

In much the same way, Jessica Valenti's Tumblr embodies the unique brand of feminism that can catalyze action from teenage girls. In tone she's relatable and authentic. Where she—and the reader—can't fathom words to respond to indignities (like the outrageous quote of a California judge on rape: "If someone doesn't want sexual intercourse, the body 'will not permit that to happen'"), she uses the hallmarks of social media communication, memes or GIFs (a moving image format). In response to the reprehensible quote from the judge, one of Jason Bateman shaking his head with the words NO NO NO flashing at the bottom. The tags on that Tumblr post? "Rape culture" and "assholes." Over the course of one link, a GIF, and two tags, she expressed her disgust powerfully, and the reader feels uniquely empowered too in this shared comprehension of a giant issue through a quickly understandable communication medium. In addressing such a disgusting quote—part of a larger issue which she covers in both previous and later posts—with the immediately recognizable communicative norms of social media, Valenti exudes both substance and style: the kind college and high school-age girls who might not otherwise declare themselves feminists can relate to.

This isn't to say that I don't look up to the amazing women who first drew me to the feminist cause. I grew up a member of that stereotypical legion of young feminists for whom Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Gloria Steinem were veritable mother goddesses. (I mean that literally. After I had the chance to meet Gloria Steinem, I had to restrain both a laugh and a nod at a friend's reaction: "Yay! Omg!!!! How was meeting Gloria Steinem? Was it like a thousand showers of awesome and happy showered down from the Mother Goddess as badassery emanated from her face?")

But if feminism is about sisterhood, then its continuance is reliant on the burgeoning ranks of role models who look and act like sisters to us. That means women we don't put up on pedestals, because they are deeply relatable; they put their flaws and foibles on display as much as their inspiring accomplishments. If "we can't be what we can't see," it's time for many more girls and young women to step up and be seen as the faces of feminism.