A group of women in the rural village Turkey of Sirt have garnered international media attention through enacting a real-life Lysistrata: they are striking from sex with their husbands to demand improvements to the city’s antiquated water system [Salon]. Since the boys were not the ones who have to hike miles out to the fountain, don’t have to wait in endless lines to collect water from the trickling fountain, don’t have to haul it home, and don’t have to be responsible for most of the household washing, the boys had not been doing much of anything to get the system fixed. Since the strike began, they have suddenly decided it might be a good idea to petition the municipal government for it to be fixed and have even offered to work on it themselves if the government will get them the parts.

Eye-roller for the day: Our women are right to protest, but we’re the ones who are suffering, grumbled Ibrahim Sari to the Milliyet newspaper. Poor boys!

I would like to point out that not only is The Feminist Blog a rad weblog publishing feminist news content every day, but Katilinne also nicely linked to Geekery Today after I sent her some fan mail. And, hey, The Weblog Review gave it a 4 out of 5. Give it a read every now and then.

Read the rest of The Feminist Blog Rocks …

Now that they no longer have a smiley-faced administration that will jerk their chains while not doing anything, a lot of gay advocate’s groups are finding out that community organizing is, in fact, a good idea [Advocate]. One of the sad things is how much mainstream liberal and left groups have lost the will to grassroots, community organizing. Conservatives, on the other hand, didn’t: throughout the Clinton Presidency they used the "liberal" administration in Washington as a smokescreen while hard Right-wing groups across the country used localized campaigns to push their agenda. A common tactic was to identify a single community facing a particular issue – such as a recently-enacted anti-discrimination bill, or the addition of an abortion clinic – and pour tons of money from all over the country into that one locale. Since local change inspires community activists, and sets precedents, it inevitably trickles up to the national level. It’s about time that more social justice groups started taking it local.

Speaking of which, the upcoming SURGE Conference will focus on developing local actions while maintaining a global perspective. Consider coming! I went last year, and it was a great experience; I plan to be going again this year.

SelectSmart has often had fun little political ideology tests that place you somewhere within the good old domains of conservatism, liberalism, libertarianism, etc. But they never had one for assessing feminist ideologies. So, I decided to make one. The result: the nifty little What Type of Feminist Are You? selector. It currently does its best to rank your affinity for radical feminism, socialist feminism, anarcha-feminism, liberal feminism, eco-feminism, libertarian feminism, womanism, girly "femme-inism," Amazon feminism, and anti-feminism.

It has some problems. For one SelectSmart only lets you put in 24 questions, and as a result I don’t have enough questions to distinguish some of the kinds of feminism. Also, SelectSmart’s methods of scoring are kind of limited. For example, I have a question "A free market economy benefits both women and men," meant to distinguish between libertarian feminists and radical feminists, socialist feminists, and anarcha-feminists, and indifferent to liberal feminists, Amazon feminists, etc. But I can only say what a question scores in favor of, not what it scores against, so somebody who disagrees that "A free market economy benefits both women and men" is marked as being equally likely to be liberal, radical, socialist, womanist, etc. … even though they are actually much more likely to be radical or socialist. Because of the problems with SelectSmart, I may end up eventually creating another survey, either with CGI programming on eskimo or with another surveying service.

Jason Mallory, an awesome boy from Fort Worth that I met at Southern Girls Convention, tipped me off to a Left/Progressive journal in Bryan/College Station (home of Texas A&M) that published a good article of his on the rape of men in prison. I was doubly pleased to read the rest of Touchstone and find an article once again blasting the historical and political attempts to whitewash the Confederacy and pretend like the Civil War had nothing much to do with slavery. (It was all about states’ rights! States’ rights to… to… to have states’ rights!)

For further reading:

• GT 5/28/2001 More on pro-Confederate revisionism and the Confederate constitution
• 3/16/2001 Anti-Southern Bigotry and Elitist Yankee Faux Liberals