<^>^<^>^<^>^<^>^<^>^<^>^<^>^<^>^<^>^<^>^<^>^<^>^<^>^<^>^<^>^<^>^<^>^<^>^<^> .....................Catt's Claws # 79 ... November 6, 1995...................... ..................... A Feminist Newsletter by Irene Stuber...................... ................................................................................ To subscribe: email >listserv@Netcom.com< and in the body of the note type >subscribe Catts-Claws and your full name< -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Paula Barbieri who claims she stayed celibate waiting for OJ says their relationship is over. In a TV interview in which she refused to give details of the breakup, she said that OJ was "going to live there (Brentwood) in that lifestyle that he used to have." "I can't answer for Nicole, but I know for me if he ever laid a hand on me I would not be there in the morning. I tell you that with not a moment's hesitation. Because he's never hit me," Barbieri told Diane Sawyer on national TV. She then explained her racist remark made during a viedotape of her just talking during a relaxing moment with another model when she was 18, some ten years ago. The two women were commenting about a case in which a teen-age black delivery boy had raped an 80-year-old woman. Barbieri described her younger self as "ignorant. Just a product of my environment. Maybe, misguided. I can't blame it on anyone." CC--> We deplore the use of any racial or sexual epitaphs, but we ask you in all honesty, what is the difference between calling a black person the "N" word and a woman a bitch - which by all standards is as bad a word? Yet the "N" word which is used freely between black men is a no-no in public while the world BITCH is used freely on TV and in family newspapers. Could it be that most script writers on TV are men, but dammit, feminist Sybil Shepard uses it for cheap laughs. Remember, Barbieri and her friend were discussing a terrible, FILTHY CRIME: the rape of an 80-year-old woman by a young, strong man. AGAIN, the women's issue is trumped by the racial card - again dealt from the bottom of the deck. <<--cc ....................... * ........................ Some scientists are on the bandwagon attempting to prove gay men are genetically that way (but for some reason the studies don't hold true for lesbians) and are now treating us to a theory that one brain part of SIX male-to-female transsexuals are about the same size as what they found in women, i.e., smaller than what they found in gay or heterosexual men, and that's a clue as to what makes gay men GENETICALLY gay ... Yeah, read that again. Gay men's brain part is larger and that proves ... huh? Other scientists pointed out that the differences were probably produced by the sex-change chemical treatments the transsexuals went through, namely high dosages of estrogen and the reduction of testosterone. All this money being spent for research on the brains of dead men while the cause of breast cancer that will afflict every one in eight women is still unknown and the research into its cause underfunded. Remember, the monthly breast checkup is for the breast you want to keep. By the way, I had my yearly mammogram today and stopped at a local fast food shoppe for breakfast, mumbling my order because I wasn't awake yet. (I don't do mornings willingly.) "I can't believe I just had a mammogram and I'm still not awake," I muttered falling all over my tongue while I pleaded for coffee. The woman behind the counter turned pale. Seems like she's been going to one of the local hospitals and she is sore for a week afterwards. "Oh, no," says I, "pain ain't part of the deal. Complain to the techie's superiors, with a copy to the CEO and your personal doctor," and I refereed her to my local clinic, a woman operated and caring facility. There are times when the compression has to be more extreme, but it should only last two or three SECONDS ... or the techie doesn't know what he's doing. ....................... * ........................ "Greetings Irene, I hope you can find a way to publish this in Catt's Claws. I enjoy your newsletter very much. I print out copies and put them in my daughter's beauty shop so that others may partake and enjoy the wisdom of so many great women across America." -- Thank You, Barb of Grandmas Herbs. Barb and others are organizing a Pagan Day Celebration march to be held in Washington, DC, Oct. 31, 1997 and is inviting everyone who believes in equality of religion to join in the planning. CC-->> The release is a bit lengthy for CC, but we are making it available to anyone who emails istuber@cswnet.com for it. You'll be hearing more about this, I'm sure. Parents in the U.S. are losing custody of their children because they don't belong to the right church! <<--cc ....................... * ........................ A suit by Air Force Academy cadet Elizabeth Saum, 22, against the academy is getting world-wide attention because it alleges physical and psychological brutality in the training of women officers. For example, Saum says that she was subjected to "simulated rape" by a male cadet during a training exercise and was observed by upperclassMEN. Just before she sued, the guys in charge said the survival training would be toned down and the female training on resistance to sexual attack would be discontinued. We don't think discontinued is what should happen; privacy would be nice but since men also get raped shouldn't they be PUBLICLY pseudo-assaulted for training purposes? ....................... * ........................ Fran L. writes about Salva, the convicted child molester who was brought back to Hollywood's good graces by the Disney people to direct the movie _Powder_. "I just remembered -- during Tom Leykis (tomleykis@AOL.com) interview of molestation victim Nathan Winters, Winters' aunt told Leykis about the plea bargain. It was quite a story. The DA assigned to the case went out of town and her temporary replacement told the family not to come to court and then made a deal to drop half of the charges against Salva. The first DA got back into town and chewed out the family for refusing to go to court until she was told about what her colleague pulled on them. At this point, it was a done deal, and the reduced charges stood. Nathan Winters said on the Leykis show that he was molested from age 8 to age 12, and it stopped when he told his mother about it. He and his family said Francis Ford Coppola (who had something to do with the movie Salva was directing and Winters was acting in during the molestation) sued the family for $1 million to force Winters back to work after he had been pulled out because of the molestation." ....................... * ........................ Singer James Brown is back in trouble with the law after his wife said he assaulted her (again). His wife Adrienne had called 911 asking for medical assistance in Aiken, South Carolina recently. Almost a year ago Adrienne had refused to testify against her husband after he was arrested for hitting her during an argument. One attorney said, dismissively, "just another story in the continuing saga of James and Adrienne Brown." (Just anothe story in the continuing saga of OJ and Nicole Brown?) ....................... * ........................ For years, Catt's Claws author has been questioning why the regular, solid, real Christian church people don't stand up to the religious supremacists. We have been told that small groups of rightists invade mainstream churches and keep them hostage by complaining loud and long when any actions are contemplated, and that many ministers are in secret agreement with the religious rights determination to return women's rights to the Stone Ages, namely destroy them. But now - A WOMAN - the Rev. Joan Campbell, general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ, has stepped forward an said the U.S. is close to becoming an immoral national by abandoning its social compact to help the poor and powerless. Campbell along with socially and morally responsible religists have formed a national "Interfaith Alliance" to counter the Christian Coalition. "If the conservative Republicans in Congress are allowed to strip poor people of governmental protection, by the turn of the century we are going to face a disaster of such a proportion our minds won't let us imagine it," she said, according to AP, Reuters, and ITN news reports. ....................... * ........................ The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case that would have allowed a mother to sue the Georgia social workers who allowed her ex-husband unsupervised visits with his son, despite a prior abduction and abuse. Following the investigation of spousal and child abuse, Sybille Wooton got sole custody of their son and a protective custody order. A short time later, the husband Michael abducted the boy and was arrested. However before Sybille could get her son, an unnamed person filed a vague charge of child abuse against Sybille (no record of who filed the charge has ever surfaced and frankly Catt's Claws was informed some years ago that there was a STRONG Men's Rights Association in Georgie working under some child care association name that worked custody cases to prevent women from getting sole custody and force lower child support payments). The county took legal custody of the boy, although they soon returned physical custody to Sybille because they couldn't substantiate any of the charges. In a few weeks, the father was allowed to take the boy out for an unsupervised visit by a substitute social worker and the father disappeared with the boy. Two months later the father and son were found in a car, its windows covered with blankets in an Arizona campsite. Michael shot the boy and then himself to death when police tried to enter the car. Sybille sued George's officials for breaking the court order. She won the lower court decision, failed at the Appellate Court level and was refused by the U.S. Supreme Court. (95-356, Wooten vs. Campbell et al) Sigh. ....................... * ........................ Amy Lewis asks, "Did I hear right when I heard that Simpson had said that he would "knock that chip off of" Marcia Clark's shoulder? I keep waiting to hear more about the quote after I heard it in a 2-second news short on CNN. Maybe you've heard." I can't get cable on the side of my hill/mountain. Anyone else hear it? ....................... * ........................ Recently Katy Butler wrote in the _L.A. Times_, "Sadly, we live in a world that produces its share of Jeffrey Dahmers, Ted Bundys, John Wayne Gacys, Susan Smiths and Francis Van Derburs." Good GAWD Katy, how can you equate Dahmer who ate his dozen victims, and Bundy who killed by the dozens, maybe hundreds (and who also did a lot of biting) to Susan Smith who, although she killed her two children, is no where in the serial killer class you are trying to lump her into. Really, girl. PULEEZE! ....................... * ........................ There is a great debate going on about repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. Well financed (usually by people, mostly men, who have been accused of sexually molesting their daughters) groups are fighting recognition of the repressed memory syndrome. It all started May 8, 1991, seven years after her father's death, when former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur announced a quarter of a million dollar grant for research into child sexual abuse. MVD revealed that she had been sexually abused by her father, a millionaire philanthropist, from the time she was five. She said she had no conscious memory of what her father had done until she remembered when she was 24, having split her life into a high- achieving "day child," and failing to recognize the terrified "night child" whose legs, she said, were repeatedly pried apart in the darkness by her father's hands. The media had a blast debating this "repressed memory stuff." Then her oldest sister, Gwen, an attorney in Hillsborough, Calif., told the Rocky Mountain News that she, too, had been molested by their father -- but she had never forgotten. As writer Katy Butler said recently in the _L.A. Times_, " After nearly a century in which many psychiatrists -- most of them male -- dismissed such reports as hysterical fantasies, women and men who were sexually abused in childhood lost patience with being spoken about and began to speak for themselves. However, the money was with the parents and the opposition, and those defending fathers (parents) are being aided by cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, the author, with journalist Katherine Ketcham, of "The Myth of Repressed Memory," and Pulitzer Prize-winning social psychologist Richard Ofshe, the author, with journalist Ethan Watters, of "Making Monsters." However, in a complete contradiction, Loftus refuses to consider that the many of the parents have alcohol problems that affect memory, or that it is common for abusers to simply forget what they did. Also, no one appears to be willing to bring in the basis of psychiatry, the couch dredging up of forgotten and suppressed memories, or the well- known and documented flash-backs that occur to those who have sustained major traumas such as war. While never doubting that there are SOME false memories, we see the well-financed anti-repressed memory campaign as just another part of the rightwing anti-humane campaign. Victims must NEVER again be silenced about what happens in the dark of the night in their homes by those who should be caring for them, not raping them. (Our thanks to Ken Pope who has sent us dozens of letters, news releases, reviews, articles, etc., about this problem.) ....................... * ........................ A anti-women's rights protester was allowed to apologize with the excuse that she was "confused" about which building was the women's clinic and a federal judge put her on probation for using a bullhorn within 150 feet of the medical facility instead of the 500 feet prescribed by law ... Lt. Richard Selland who had challenged the military's "don't ask, don't tell policy" under the freedom of speech and due process constitutional umbrella had his claim thrown out of court and may be discharged from the U.S. Navy after a 2.5 year fight. U.S. District Court Judge Joseph H. Young said Selland's claims to constitutional rights do not override the military's need to keep morale high and maintain discipline. "This court is convinced it should not revisit the findings that underlie the 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' policy and must defer to the military's decision," Young wrote. Catt's Claws questions: "When did the U.S. Military get the power to override the Constitution of the United States?" ....................... * ........................ From the news reports about a police officer dressed up as a clown going trick 'r treating in Paulsboro, NJ, in order to arrest delinquent routine traffic offenders, it seems that mostly women were arrested, handcuffed, and taken away under guard while their children watched .... ....................... * ........................ "If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base." -- Dave Barry ....................... * ........................ 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.<<<<