!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.! ! ! ! Catt's Claws ... A Feminist Newsletter #74 ... October 10, 1995 ! ! ! !.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.! There was no Catt's Claws on October 8, 1995. We were too depressed, along with most of the women of this country ... even those who couldn't express it in their black neighborhoods. We had a NUMBER of black women contact us, in confidence, of course, just to get it off their chests. BTW, let me AGAIN point out that Catt's Claws expresses a personal viewpoint and does not reflect any organization nor any formal feminist position. The HUNDREDS of notes and phone calls we received regarding the OJ verdict is indicative of the great need women have for getting out the facts (and suppositions) that the male-dominated media don't. For example, this morning I received an irate phone call from a former prison guard (Hispanic male) about the OJ decision and wondered why NOW or ANY WOMEN'S GROUP hadn't done anything to protest. (see below) "If it had gone the other way, there would have been riots." And he had another complaint. "Why isn't anyone doing anything about the woman serving 15 years in the penitentiary for super gluing her husband's penis to his leg?" We hadn't heard of it, which, of course, is not surprising since HER punishment for temporarily preventing her husband from his constant rapes and beatings got 15 years while the man in Alabama who murdered his two daughters for insurance money and to stop child support payments got considerably less. ....................... * ........................ Tammy Bruce, president of Los Angeles NOW, can be a very difficult person and is certainly not beloved in National NOW headquarters. While Tammy was on the National NOW board, she often went head-to-head with NOW prexy Patricia Ireland. We though she was merely being contentious, but we have begun to think that maybe she just didn't know how to express the unease she had with NOW inactions and paper shuffling. hat's merely a guess, but at least in the face of the OJ decision, she has been just about the only NOW leader willing to do anything. She criticized Judge Lance Ito for some of his sexist remarks early on in the trial and brought about some changes. And last Saturday she organized about 2,000 people who gathered near a store where Nicole Brown Simpson used to shop, lit candles, and walked the route she used to jog, then marched to her home. The march ended at Ms. Simpson's condominium, where she was found slain in the walkway June 12, 1994. Many in the crowd cheered local NOW president Tammy Bruce as she held up a portrait of O.J. Simpson's ex-wife and said: "He may have gotten out of a courtroom, but now he will face the courtroom of public opinion." ....................... * ........................ More than 100,000 midlife and older Americans live with roommates; nearly 900,000 live with a partner. The face of America's family continues to change. According to several recent studies, the trend towards more and more nontraditional living arrangements will continue to rise. Unrelated women, more than men, form "non-related family groups" if for no other reason than women live longer than men. Many women are choosing to live alone or with a non-related woman even when a family member is available. It often represents the first time in a woman's life she is able to be herself without family demands on her time and energy. All in all, according to the Census Bureau, 59% of Americans 45 and older live in nontraditional arrangements with 17% of them living with unrelated roommates and partners. There is a growing number of grandparents who have taken over the raising of their grandchildren from their parents, for whatever reason. ....................... * ........................ C. Delores Tucker, a Democrat and chair of the National Political Congress of Black Women, appears to have won a big battle in her crusade against rap music's violent and sexually-explicit content when the mega-media Time Warner Inc., announced its decision to quit the "gangsta-rap" music business. We just wish it didn't sound so much like censorship although we consider "gangsta-rap" as vile and unconscionable as the suggestion that OJ appear with the leaders of the Black Muslim march against violence set for this weekend. Even Johnnie Cochran is begging off that parade and his "bodyguard-cum-status-icons" are Black Muslims. Many black women are saying the march will be more a warning to women that black men are uniting as are the white Promise Keepers to put women back into their place. The leaders of two large black organizations, Rev. Henry J. Lyons, president of the 7.8 million-member National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., and Rev. Bennett W. Smith Sr., head of the 2 million-member Progressive National Baptist Convention, are also opposing the march and lashed out against Jesse Jackson for saying ALL blacks favored the march. Jackson said he would attend. ....................... * ........................ James Alan Austin, who confessed to killing the 5-week-old son he had with the help of a woman paid to be its mother through a fertility clinic, was sentenced Thursday to the maximum of 12.5 to 25 years in prison. He beat the infant to get him to stop crying. Austin's attorney asked for the court's leniency saying his client read baby books and tried to prepare himself for fatherhood, "But you can't read about 3 am feedings and you can't read about sleep deprivation and you can't read about a colicky baby." Austin also tried to blame the fertility clinic for not teaching him how to be a parent. No kidding ... you can't read about 3 am feedings - sleep deprivation, etc. Well, women are expected to put up with that shit as well as take care of their other children, the home, their jobs, and their poor husbands who need THEIR sleep ... ALSO - WHEN THE BLANKETY-BLANK ARE THE SO-CALLED FEMINIST LEADERS OF THIS NATION GOING TO GET DOWN THE BACKS OF MEDIA MOGULS AND STOP THIS NONSENSE ABOUT "SURROGATE" MOTHERHOOD. Last time I looked when a woman had a baby in her belly she was a MOTHER, not a SURROGATE mother. There MIGHT be some question about a woman being a MOTHER if the embryo is implanted and consists of another woman's genes, but her own genes? She is a MOTHER! ....................... * ........................ Junior Bumbury, 22, was arrested when two New York police officers saw him bang a 13-year-old girl's head against a street lightpost. Bumbury was charged with rape of an underage girl, sodomy, sexual abuse, unlawful imprisonment, and endangering the welfare of a child. The girl, from Utah, had been in New York for a taping of the Sally Jessy Raphael show. Bumbury says she told him she was 17. ....................... * ........................ A number of local Elks Club are still vowing to keep women out after the national groups removed the word "male" as a membership requirement after a vote by its lodges nationwide. The Elks spent more than a million dollars in recent years fighting lawsuits filed by women who wanted to join. The way the lodges intend to get around it is the requirement that candidates must have a two/thirds vote of approval by existing members. Women will simply be blackballed. Might be tempted to try to break the line locally, but it's a place where women wear cocktail dresses and their men wear jeans and baseball caps. ....................... * ........................ We have heard rumors - sorry, but the sports pages aren't on my reading list - that Lawrence Phillips was back on the team and playing football. The powers that be at Nebraska University are claiming the Heisman Trophy candidate wasn't the one doing the beating of his girlfriend, etc., ad nauseam. She is rumored to still be in hiding in another state. Oh, how money talks ... Phillips gets off, OJ gets off ... who next? ....................... * ........................ A study by the International Conference on Population and Development indicated a woman in Zaire is 1,000 times more likely to die of childbirth and pregnancy than a woman in modern Europe. Social mores dictated by religions often cause a terrible loss of women's lives in sub-Sahara, which has the highest maternal death rate in the world. (Birth control or male self-control are considered unnatural.) But that area's inhumanity to women is not alone. Many areas have taboos against certain food being ingested by pregnant women - mostly healthy foods - which lead to death from malnutrition and defective or dead babies. For example, many patriarchal societies still insist that women give birth alone - where there is no help if anything goes wrong - or only with untrained female relatives. ....................... * ........................ When will they EVER learn? Lt. Col. Raymond Kerr, former security chief at the Patrick Air Force Base, was sentenced to six months in prison for assaulting the wife of one of his subordinates. He had been acquitted of two sexual misconduct charges recently. A 23-year-veteran, he will lose all military and veteran benefits ... maybe. Let's see what magically happens in a couple of months. Remember the guy who refused to lead his command to the invasion of Haiti because there were women in the group and as a fundamentalist Christian, he didn't believe in putting women in danger ... and after directly refusing an order, he was STILL allowed his rank in the army? Did he or anyone guarantee no Haitian women civilians would be shot? Or don't black women count? Modern warfare stats indicates 10 civilians are killed for every one soldier. ....................... * ........................ Kate Hale, Dade County emergency director when hurricane Andrew slammed West Dade County in 1991 during the Bush administration, demanded to know: "Where the hell is the cavalry?" The victims of Opal on the Gulf Coast didn't have to ask that this time. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), under the direction of Bill Clinton's appointee James Lee Witt, was there, ready, and swung into action the moment the winds died down. As it did during several other catastrophes, including the quake in California, the bombing in Oklahoma City, and other hurricanes, FEMA was right there with planeloads of help on the way before the dust settled. One of the reasons we mention the FEMA situation is that women and children are often the most victimized after a catastrophe. The guys go off and get food and water for themselves while the weaker women, often burdened with children, are shoved back or made to stay at the makeshift residences, afraid to get out to fight for foot with the male mobs. Studies show that women getting supplies for their families take everything home to share while most of the men eat and drink immediately upon receiving the supplies and take home only the leftovers. Hey, we don't make these things up. Talk to anyone in emergency situations. Next time you see TV coverage of refugee camps, or other such situations, notice the ratio of male and female. Open thy eyes! BTW, Clinton's appointee James Lee Witt is a black man - and a good man. ....................... * ........................ New York mothers will be allowed to learn the results of an automatic AIDS test given to all newborn babies... and also their own health because an HIV positive baby indicates the mother is HIV positive. In the past, according to the New York _Times_, mothers were not informed because a positive HIV indicates the mother carries the virus. The secrecy, it was claimed, was to preserve the woman's right to choose whether she wants to know her HIV status, but it also preserved the male's "innocent" status so he might go on to infect other women. ....................... * ........................ Colleges and universities are being warned to clean up their sexual harassment act or face hefty lawsuits. Michelle Gretzinger filed a complaint with the University of Hawaii claiming Ramdas Lamb, an assistant professor of religion, sexually assaulted and harassed her when she was in his class. Lamb was evidentally using his position to bribe or threaten his students into sexual encounters. The university took more than a year to investigate the matter and withheld the report for another year. Lamb was not removed. Last week UH settled with Gretzinger for $175,000, in what her attorney said was an "exploitation of students by faculty members who abuse the power of their position and by a system that is insensitive to the plight of the victims." There is no word in the news reports we saw on whether Lamb remains teaching religion at UH or what happened to Paul Yuen, the UH senior vice president who refused to act on the college's own report and dismissed the case against Lamb. ....................... * ........................ Nancy Mellette, a senior at a North Carolina military preparatory academy, replaces Shannon Faulkner, who dropped out of The Citadel in August (along with more than 100 male cadets) after less than a week as the first female cadet at the state military college. The court battle -- now focused on whether a women's leadership program at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., is a legal alternative to women at the Citadel -- will go to trial on Nov. 13. ....................... * ........................ Military records show that 169 U.S. Marines and sailors in Japan have been court-martialed for rape, child molestation, or other sex crimes since 1988, the Dayton Daily News reported Sunday. The newspaper's computer analysis of military records showed that bases in Japan had more sexual assault trials of Marines and sailors than any other location in the world. In an ITN article about the high rape figures, Army Reserve Maj. Kathy Platoni, a clinical psychologist in suburban Centerville, said military personnel overseas often feel liberated from the social structures that controlled their behavior at home. "There is often a party atmosphere and an attitude of `I can act out, and I'm not going to get caught.' That's why they feel free to abuse other humans," she said. ....................... * ........................ You think WE have advertising problems? Italian fashion ad copy takes swipes at Catholic tradition, suggesting, for instance, that the jeans be washed in holy water -- presumably to purify them. (From ITN News.) ....................... * ........................ Canadian Roman Catholic school trustees may ban the Impressions series of books put out by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston because some parents claim its recounting of fables and myths promote witchcraft and paganism. Look for the ban request to spread. ....................... * ........................ A woman who died of AIDS in 1993 may have her day in court after all. She claimed - and so testified in a preliminary hearing - that Robert Barembruch raped and beat her. The Crown dropped the charges when the woman died, but it refiled at the insistence of the woman's family and is being prosecuted by Ravi Hira. ....................... * ........................ Aw. Sniff, soft music, and a few tears ... House Speaker Newt Gingrich's book is not selling so good. In fact, only 400,000 copies of _To Renew America_ may be sold, not the 3/4 of a million that had been predicted. But he'll still get his $1.4 million from the publishing firm of British financier- publisher- television mogul Rupert Murdoch, a mighty comedown from the original $4.5 millions he was going to get until critics pointed out the Murdoch-Gingrich meetings that gave the "impression" of politic influence peddling. By the way - the lower-than-expected sales of Gingrich's book indicates again that the Far Right, religious supremacists have fewer followers than expected. All they have is REALLLLLLLY BIIIGGG mouths. ....................... * ........................ Well, where is Chanel when we need her? The newest fashion statement - in keeping with the child porno stuff of the Calvin Klein ads - is dressing women in frilly kindergarten styles. From the Italian fashion show runways: "Pretty little party dresses, cute jump suits, demure shorts, and coyly cropped tops combine to make a wardrobe fit for a kindergarten student," according to AP. ....................... * ........................ Two men who unfurled a "Condoms Save Lives," banner along the popemobile route along Fifth Avenue in New York were arrested for criminal trespassing and reckless endangerment. They had crawled out a department store window, without permission, stood on a ledge six stories up, and unfurled the three-story-high banner. A recent ABC-Washington Post poll indicated only 12 percent of American Catholics believe abortion is wrong under any circumstances. While the pope was safe inside his popemobile avoiding god's will regarding any attempted assassinations, he was telling Catholic women to obey god's will and face death and poverty through uncontrolled pregnancies. His last words in the U.S. were against abortion whether or not a woman's life was in danger. During the pope's Fifth Avenue parade, protests were held by about 500 who marched to Columbus Circle. One of the speakers Gloria Steinem said John Paul represents only the handful of men -- "not one woman whatsoever among them." "We will live to see the day that St. Patrick's Cathedral is a child-care center and the pope is no longer a disgrace to the skirt that he has on," she said. ....................... * ........................ Catt's Claws was highly criticized for implying the OJ jury was going after money for their experiences. Well, have you been watching the talk shows? At least FIVE - count 'em - FIVE are looking for deals. Brenca Moran is writing a book with a "very soon" publication date, according to her attorney, Robert Ball. Three other jurors have retained attorney Steve Lerman in an admitted search for commercial deals, and another is using his journal as the basis for a book. ....................... * ........................ Catt's Claws salutes volunteers Jennifer Gagliardi for posting Catt's Claws through her listserv and Paula Levine for her proofreading. ................................................. To receive Catt's Claws by email, write and in the body of the note No name, nothing else. ....................... * ........................ Women's rights are young and tender and we must protect them from the plagues of holy hypocrisy and newts. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- >>> Send your ideas, comments, and news to istuber@cswnet.com for inclusion in the Catt's Claws feminist newsletter which will be emailed three times a week: Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. This is NOT an interactive discussion net but an exchange of information and is NOT sponsored by any organization. We are accepting *limited* donations (only what can be spared) to help offset the online costs of posting Catt's Claws. Irene Stuber. PO Box 6185, Hot Springs, AR 71902.<<<<