Photo courtesy of Myra Trivellas

By ANNIE ATURA

April 29, 2010

It’s hardly surprising that George W. Bush’s tactics to de-fang Title IX failed to attract the media coverage they deserved. Bush was at the helm of a smorgasbord of treacherous projects, and those gruesome endeavors were the proper focus of public outrage. True, war crimes warrant more attention than women’s sports, but the Bush Administration managed to weaken equity in our school system while we were all staring, open-mouthed, at the most egregious offenses. Luckily, Obama took note of the smaller sins of his predecessor and is now taking steps to undo Bush’s damage. This week, one such reversal was announced.

Title IX, which outlaws gender discrimination within federally financed education programs, is most popularly known for its equalizing effect on women’s athletics in public schools. Under Title IX, women are guaranteed access to the same sports programs as men. The provision, passed on June 23, 1972 as an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was intended primarily as a means of protecting women against hiring discrimination; only in its implementation did the bill’s focus shift to extracurricular programs.

Cohen v. Brown, filed in 1992 and decided in 1995, determined the test of adherence to Title IX in the sports arena. The case was brought against Brown by a group of female athletes after the school cut the volleyball and gymnastics teams for fiscal reasons. In their decision, the court effectively established three systems of criteria to determine appropriate representation of female athletes: schools must either show 1) that their athletic enrollment by gender is proportional to their general enrollment by gender; 2) that they are in a process of continual expansion of sports programs for the underrepresented sex; or 3) that the school fully and effectively accommodates the interest and ability of the underrepresented sex. The first test proved the most common and effective method of demonstrating true equality of opportunity.

Bush significantly curtailed the power of Title IX by reforming the method of its institution. Prior to 2005, schools generally tested their compliance with Title IX by employing the proportionality test. But in 2005, the Office of Civil Rights declared a ‘clarification’ of the three-prong test, claiming that schools could demonstrate student interest by conducting online surveys.

This system proved detrimental to the gender equality of athletic education for two reasons. First, it allowed schools to interpret a lack of student response as a lack of interest. Second, it neglected the obvious confusion of cause and effect – students interested in a particular sport would elect to go to a school that offered that sport, whether or not the school was desirable for other reasons. Thus, students that would otherwise be interested in a thriving team might be unaware of their own abilities in the sport, not having been exposed to it, and those already aware of their ability might have chosen not to attend at all.

The Obama reform, announced April 20, still allows schools to employ the third prong of the judicial test, but requires that schools wishing to do so supplement their internet surveys with other tests, including analysis of the athletic compositions of feeder high schools and tracking of club teams’ petitions to become varsity sports.

Luckily, the Obama reform isn’t really changing business as usual — just ideology as represented by the books. The Bush system was so execrable that even the NCAA opposed it, and it wasn’t ever commonly implemented for precisely that reason: the NCAA advised schools under its jurisdiction to employ the proportionality test instead. Advocates of under-enrolled men’s sports (like wrestling), which are the first to go when schools equitably distribute limited funds, were the only vocal defenders of Bush’s system.

More funding for schools is always preferable to less funding, but it’s hardly fair to favor men in distributing those funds currently available to athletic departments. To quote Joe Biden, “Making Title IX as strong as possible is a no-brainer. What we’re doing here today will better ensure equal opportunity in athletics, and allowing women to realize their potential — so this nation can realize its potential.”

Photo: photobucket

By ANNIE ATURA

April 28, 2010

The following interview is unedited. It took place at seven o’clock on April 27, 2010 in the Branford College Master’s House, minutes before the Ying Yang Twins took the stage at Spring Fling. When I entered, there was a massive spread of catering from Popeye’s on the dining room table. Yang was on the couch in the fetal position; he participated in the first part of the interview supine. Upon Ying’s arrival – he had been touring Branford with Master Steven Smith – Yang sat up. The interview was made possible by WYBC Yale Radio.

Annie Atura: So which one are you? Ying or Yang?

Yang: Yang.

AA: So what’s the difference? Do you complete each other?

Yang: Yeah. My brother’s more of the peace; I’m more of the war.

AA: So do you have any feelings about Yale? Education in general?

Yang: We all need an education.  That’s the feeling I have about it. As far as college, or anything like that, I never really got into that. My main goal was to just get out of high school. I ain’t never really plan no college or anything.  I don’t want to waste my own smarts. Because my family sure ain’t have no damn money to send me to college. So my main accomplishment was just to get a diploma. ‘Cause nowadays, you ain’t got no diploma you can’t even work at McDonald’s, dammit!

AA: What did your parents do?

Yang: Um, shit. My dad painted cars before I was born, and still paint cars. My mom at home. She don’t really have no choice. So now I take care of ‘em.

AA: Are you aware that there was controversy surrounding the Ying Yang Twins’ coming here?

Yang: There usually always is when we go to any college.

AA: Really? Why?

Yang: People always – sensitive people, you know what I’m saying, they don’t like certain stuff. You’re never going to get everybody to like everything. But the main thing that people have to realize when they – uh – pull those type of moves toward the Ying Yang Twins: we are the people’s favorite rap group. So we’re just like, all that other, uh, how do you say, um, when they try to start, that shit ain’t gonna work with the Ying Yang Twins. We provide a fun feeling. And then, how many other people in the world you think parents didn’t like the music they listened to. It ain’t just the Ying Yang Twins. People, the older people, like your parents or grandparents, whoever listened to every person that their parents couldn’t like every person, you know what I’m saying. Everything is a reenactment, over and over. But the thing that people have to realize is that everybody ain’t an uptight asshole.

AA: Well, do you think that your music is misogynistic?

Yang: Um … No. Because we make songs, we let it be known that we make songs for exotic dancers. You know, once we came out. So anybody that was against that, I look at it like this: if you’re not a stripper, if you don’t work at a nudie bar, then you ain’t really have a point to try to make a point against us. Because the same women that you might not be fond of if they work in exotic bars, they’ve got the same type of situation we all have. People have to take care of themselves. I don’t know anybody that lives anywhere in this nation or anywhere in the world that can live off love. Money pays bills. Everybody ain’t going to like everything. I already know that, so I’m ready for the worst. They call me Mr. Worst First anywhere I go.  You can’t really – you can’t make me see a closed door. A person that has something to say derogatory every time – although we have derogatory lyrics – in the situations that we represent, to those women, the lyrics are not derogatory. They are helpful.

AA: So: “For real bitch / Don’t take this shit wrong / Thinking I’m nice / I’ll break your jawbone:” that’s something that they would consider helpful?

Yang: I mean, it all goes along with what we promote.

AA: Well what exactly do you promote?

Yang: Um … We, our main objective as the Ying Yang Twins was to make hype songs for women that work in the strip club.

AA: So things that they could get excited about?

Yang: Yeah, versus letting them dance to fucking John Cougar Mellencamp.

AA: Mm hm.

Yang: Or Pink Floyd. You know what I’m saying?

AA: So you think women can get excited about things like, “Fuck you til you cry”?

Yang: Right! Because a lot of the women that know us – the women that work in the exotic clubs – and other women that don’t work in the club, they say, You  guys know how to explain, when you talk about us. So, when you make the little gesture about the bitch here, or, trick, or ho there, it’s not as bad as a illiterate person trying to use the same type of lyrics. In other words, you have to have smarts, in order to get smart with a person.

AA: So you think that you actually empathize with women?

Yang: Yeah. That’s right.

AA: How much time do you actually spend in strip clubs?

Yang: Um, that’s our whole career. Like, just like, all right, I’ll put it to you like this. Everything we’ve accomplished over the years we’ve been the Ying Yang Twins, since 1997, all right, over the years, it’s not any type of performance we won’t do. We do squeaky clean shows, we do X rated shows, that’s why every time we come to a college we ask what do they prefer. You know what I’m saying? We already know the stacked deck gonna be up against us but when, we’re not one of those groups that you’re going to be able to just – uh uh uh – downplay. You know why? What is this, New Haven, Connecticut, right? We’ve been at Spring Bling [sic] before, and kids, they be like, We drove all the way from Connecticut, listening to nothing but the Ying Yang Twins! So, you know, far as certain people not liking what you do, you know you ain’t never going to get everyone to like you. So what?

Ying: Well I don’t mean to come in, rude and everything,

AA: No, please!

Ying: But uh, they say we was at Yale. I thought all the deaf people was here ’cause they said Yale. Laughs.

AA: So what is it exactly that draws you to strip clubs?

Yang: Strip clubs – if you ain’t never been to Atlanta, there’s a lot of clubs all over this nation, but we have the best. They get all the way naked.

Ying: You say what drives us to strip clubs?

AA: Yes, right, he was talking about how much he enjoyed strip clubs –-

Yang: Right.

AA: — and how you make a lot of music for the women that work in strip clubs.

Ying: What do women do in the strip clubs? That’s what draws us there! They ain’t got on no underwear! Where your underclothes at! My bad, my bad! My bad, baby!

AA: So describe your ideal woman?

Yang: Ideal woman, what do you mean?

AA: I don’t know. To mate with.

Ying: Cool. Down to earth. Smoke. Drink.

Yang: Lady in the street but a freak in the bed.

AA: Really? That’s your ideal?

Yang: I mean, yeah. When I say lady I mean in every aspect of the word.  Uh uh uh uh.

Ying: I guess my ideal woman is my wife.

AA: Would you date an exotic dancer?

Yang: No.

AA: Why? Why not?

Yang: Why? ‘Cause she gets paid to provide a service that requires a certain – uh uh uh uh um – sensitive situation, how I look at it. When someone’s together and they be intimate, that’s a private thing right? Ok. So that’s sacred, whether you be married or not. But if they got a club that I can go – now, say if I’m trying to talk to this lady. It take me six months to a year for her to get comfortable with me. But if she work in the club, I ain’t got to talk to her.

Ying: Takes her sixteen seconds.

Yang: Five or six minutes.

AA: And that’s unattractive to you?

Yang: Um, it’s not actually –

Ying: No no I’m not saying it’s unattractive. But if she’s doing that to me or him or him, how many other men within a day is she doing that to? So if you calculate that within the week, and then you calculate that within the month, and then you calculate that within the year – I don’t want my wife, or anybody who that I feel like this is my soul mate, out there showing my goodies, my goodies, my goodies not my goodies, you know what I’m saying?

Yang: The exchange rate is getting to know a person versus giving them a couple of dollars to take their clothes off.

Ying: Do you want your man showing off all your goodies?

AA: Well, it depends, right? I also don’t go to strip clubs.

Ying: Would you date a stripper? Would you date a male stripper?

AA: Well I don’t go to male strip clubs.

Ying: But would you date a male stripper? Even if you don’t go, even though you ignorant to the point that you don’t go, would you date a male stripper?

AA: Yes. Yes I would.

Ying: So you cool with a lot of other women looking at your goodies.

AA: Yeah.

Ying: No, for me it’s only me, myself, and I.

AA: How much of your day do you spend naked?

Ying: Say what?

AA: How much of your day do you spend naked?

Yang: It all depends on how long you want to be naked.

Ying: I’m just saying though how many people am I showing it to in a day?

AA: I don’t know, how many people are you showing it to in a day?

Ying: I’m not. I ain’t showing it to nobody but me myself and my wife, you know. I don’t even show my homeboys myself like that, you know. So to show somebody else –

AA: How do you feel about things like gay marriage? Are you comfortable with homosexuality?

Yang: No. I’m not with that.

Ying: No, I’m not with that.

AA: You’re not with that?

Yang: Opposites attract. That shit is a no-go with me. You know I mean, straight up. The female was made for the man, the man was made for the female, and that’s how that shit’s supposed to go. All together. There ain’t no way around that shit. You can’t – two of the same motherfuckers can’t reproduce, so that don’t help the world.

Ying: Well I’m not gay and I don’t, um, involve my circle, I’m cool, whatever you do, that’s your life. I have nothing against it.

Yang: I respect gays, ’cause most families have one in their family. I respect them. As far as being with that shit? No.

AA: Do you think they should be allowed to marry?

Yang: I don’t see it.

Ying: Uhhh – by by by by biblical law –

AA: Are you religious?

Yang: Religious is nothing but a pawn of slavery.

Ying: No I’m just saying, biblical law, it’s not supposed to go on. So human law it’s cool. I’m just saying at the end of the day, that person who’s planning to get married and do whatever they have to do to the opposite sex – I mean the same sex – they have to face the Maker at the end of the day. We don’t. So biblically we have nothing to do with that.

AA: So you’re religious (Ying) and you aren’t (Yang)?

Ying: No I’m just saying that’s just the way it goes.

Yang: I don’t choose a religion.

Ying: Biblically, it’s not supposed to go on. But by man laws, since ten years ago, it’s cool to go around and say I’m gay. Ten years ago you couldn’t do it. It was like, you say, I’m gay, and someone almost would whoop ya.

Yang: There’s some sensitive people in this world just like the people in California. All that shit trickles down.

Ying: Ok, ok. When do laws change?

Yang: All the time.

Ying: Laws change when gays become part of politics.

Yang: Laws change all the time, shorty.

Ying: They change every day, that’s what I’m saying. So now that you’ve got more gays in the lawmaking decision, damn right, it’s cool now.

Yang: I still don’t feel like that.

Ying: Shit. Really? Really if you want to tell the truth about it, biblically, they’ve been gay since the beginning of time! They just was keeping it in the closet.

Yang: They been Romans doing that shit.

Ying: Come on, there’s more priests and preachers that mess with little boys than we even fail to acknowledge. But we don’t want to acknowledge that. We done swept that up under the table. All right, let’s talk about these gays and homosexuals we got going on right now, but we ain’t going to talk about that priest that was messing with young Bobby when little Bobby was too young to know what was going on.

Yang: It’s like this, if you gonna point the finger at one thing you gotta point the finger at everything.

Ying: At everything. It’s been going on long before us.

Yang: Yeah so don’t try to. Like a lot of people try to take that shit and apply it wherever someone’s a little rougher than they would like.

Ying: Little Bobby try to build his life around – I’m not this way I’m not this way I’m not this way I’m not this way – and he try to build his life around that until when he try to face the way he is, he has to buckle his knees like a wimpy little girl. To the person that’s not even higher than him. He done have a child, he done married, he done do everything that he think that in G-d’s eyes is for him to do. And that’s why I’m like, why are you sitting around here making like it’s not ok to do this it’s not ok to do this, but when someone else come out and say, Well I’ve done it, that’s close to you, you like, Well I was like that too! I just didn’t really want to say nothing. For what?

Yang: Well you know like people like, that wait ‘til somebody else start something before they say something, those are bitches.

Ying: If you like penis, say you like penis. If you like kitty cat, say you like kitty cat.

Yang: With me? I’m not as sensitive as the world is. I’m not G-d, I’m not Jesus, and I’m not that sensitive, because there’s some ugly shit that occurs in the world every day. And we still be forced to have a look at it and deal with it.

Annie Atura is a junior in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

–

Correction: The initial transcript of this interview used the informal spellings “cuz” and “ax.” For the sake of consistency, the revised transcript uses “’cause” instead of “cuz” and “ask” instead of “ax.”

April 21, 2010

Wilma Mankiller was not unaware of the satirical possibilities of her surname. In a 1993 speech at Sweet Briar College, she quipped, “I told [my driver] it was a nickname, and I’d earned it. So I’m sure there’s some yuppie somewhere still wondering what I did to earn my last name.” It takes a certain kind of person to ironically repeat the stereotypes about one’s own race and gender, and then take no special pains to be politically correct oneself, about the “yuppie” bourgeoisie. Mankiller was intrepid.

The first female chieftain of the Cherokee nation, Wilma Mankiller died on April 6, still stoutheartedly engaging with – and amiably mocking – the assumptions made about her gender, culture, and social values. She served as Chief from 1985 to 1995, when serious health problems forced her into retirement. Perhaps because of her self-imposed outsider status, Mankiller made no bones about her sense of humor. And perhaps because she refused to take her own history too seriously, she succeeded in convincing the overwhelming majority of Cherokee constituents that a complicated past would not adversely affect her leadership capabilities.

Mankiller’s recent death reminds us of the complicated stance that victims are forced to assume in light of their collective setbacks. Mankiller assumed control of her tribe while it was in the midst of serious internal issues, and she dealt with those issues by both recognizing their historical basis and insisting that they be actively addressed. Her sense of humor echoed that double sensibility: she played on racial and sexual undertones while refusing to admit the legitimacy of prejudice.

The origin of “Mankiller” is not as far from its intuitive meaning as one might think: the name denotes her ancestor’s tribal position as a soldier of sorts, the man responsible for the physical protection of the tribe on a daily basis. Ms. Mankiller explained, “When we lived here in the Southeast, we lived in semi-autonomous villages, and there was someone who watched over the village, who had the title of ‘mankiller.’” It is appropriate, then, that she herself should assume a protective role for her tribe.

Despite her promising last name, however, Mankiller’s suitability for a tribal leadership position was not particularly apparent during the first 35 years of her life. Her mother, Clara Irene Sitton, was a Dutch and Irish woman who had chosen to integrate herself into the Cherokee community, and Mankiller was the sixth of her eleven children. When Mankiller was eleven, the family moved from its plot of allotment lands in Oklahoma to a house in San Francisco under the Indian Relocation Program. Mankiller completed her high school education there and married at seventeen. She had two daughters with her husband, Hugo Olaya, a student from Ecuador. They moved to Oakland, and Mankiller decided to attend junior college at what was then San Francisco State College. She became involved with the San Francisco Indian Center. As an active member of that organization, she participated in the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969, in which Native Americans took over the former prison, claiming that its status as surplus federal property rendered it properly Native Americans’ under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. The occupation lasted for a full 19 months before it was forcibly quelled by the federal government.

Mankiller divorced Olaya in 1977 and moved back to Oklahoma with her two daughters in hopes of reconnecting with her tribe. She remarried to a staunch Cherokee traditionalist, Charlie Lee Soap, in 1986. The two moved back to Mankiller’s ancestral lands. She was elected as Deputy Chief for Ross Swimmer. When he chose to step down to become head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1985, she assumed the position of Chief. She was elected in her own right in 1987, and was reelected in 1991, when she received 83% of the popular vote. Though Mankiller received death threats and tire slashings during her campaign, there is no evidence that Mankiller’s personal life actively affected her judgment; her two-time landslide election seems to indicate that the Cherokee citizens also believed that to be the case.

At the heart of Mankiller’s political philosophy lay the conviction that a community should take responsibility for itself. After moving back to Oklahoma and taking on a low-level job in the Cherokee government, she began a project to bring fresh water to the community. The Bell Water and Housing Project put every participating family in charge of funding and installing one mile of water pipeline. Its success contributed to the choice to elect her as Deputy and, in time, Chief. The project was in keeping with her general philosophy: that Native Americans should, as she often said, “solve their own economic problems.” Mankiller made good on those words. In 1990, she signed a bill that placed the Cherokee Nation in charge of national funds previously administered on their behalf by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She also improved the infrastructure of the community by improving the judicial, criminal, taxation, and education systems. In a statement honoring her memory, Obama praised Mankiller’s improvement of the “Nation-to-Nation relationship between the Cherokee Nation and the Federal Government.” Mankiller championed the full agency of Native Americans, and of all women, by demonstrating their ability to care for themselves.

Despite her personal experience with racism and predatory governmental policy, Mankiller eschewed unsympathetic attacks on the oppressor. Instead, she focused her energies on active education. In her editor’s note in The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History she writes, “Even the most committed feminist scholars knew little about contemporary Native American women or our history. But then who can blame them when Native American people, women in particular, are not even a blip on the national screen? Because there is so little accurate information about Native American women in either educational institutions or the popular culture, stereotypes are pervasive.”

Mankiller was aware of her unique role in history. “Prior to my election, young Cherokee girls would never have thought that they might grow up and become chief,” she proudly asserted. But she was also aware of the ways in which she constituted a perfectly unremarkable continuation of the Cherokee tradition. “In some tribes women have held and still hold powerful leadership positions,” she wrote in The Reader’s Companion. Mankiller described how the Cherokee had sent tutors to Mount Holyoke to prepare them for educating girls at home after an Indian relocation in 1839, establishing education for Native American women even as it was denied to white ones.

Mankiller did not shy away from her past or identity any more than she cited it as the foundation of her perspicacity. She did not represent herself in a masculine or gender-neutral light; rather she embraced her gender heritage only when appropriate, as when she described the process of writing a book with other women to “weaving a communal basket.”

She was unafraid of appearing weak. She prized none of the trappings of chiefdom that related to ritualized hierarchy. “At home I can think of very, very few people who call me ‘Chief;’ most people just call me Wilma, and that’s how I ask people to address me,” she said. She attributed a great deal of her own fearlessness to her extraordinary health hurdles. In 1979, she was in a near-fatal car accident, and she suffered myasthenia gravis, kidney problems (which led to a transplant), breast cancer, and lymphoma.

The Cherokee only achieved the right to elect their own chief in 1971 – prior to that time the Chief was a US government appointee chosen for his amenability to federal interests. It is telling that one of the tribe’s first self-appointed leaders was a woman, who had described the powerful Indian Center in San Francisco as a place for “sort of refugees,” and who had taught herself to work as a paralegal even though nobody she knew went to college. It was only “[a]bsolute faith and confidence in our own people and our own ability to solve our own problems” that accounted for her interest in government, and that same innate drive for improvement– rather than for victimization– led to her political success.

Annie Atura is a junior in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

April 16, 2010

The premise of The Nine Rooms of Happiness, a book written by the editor of Self magazine and her psychiatrist friend, is that a woman’s mind is like a house. It needs to be tended to by the lady of the house. When it is clean, the woman who owns it is happy. Every morning we women should wake up and ask ourselves, “Where’s the mess today?”

Questionable? I think so.

Lucy Danziger and Catherine Birndorf, M.D. presented this hypothesis at a Master’s Tea in Pierson this past Thursday. Their newly published self-help book aimed at women attempts to make psychodynamic therapy friendly by presenting it in an easily digestible and stereotypically feminine format. The book is full of short sentences, and examples are drawn from the life of an “ordinary” woman on a hard day – troubles at work, troubles at home, and, of course, troubles with weight. At the tea, Birndorf said that she wrote the book because she wanted to bring therapy down from the “ivory tower.” Nevertheless, the authors’ assumptions are suspiciously condescending.

In keeping with her co-author, Danziger’s attitude throughout the tea expressed her conviction that all women are fundamentally alike. She claimed to be an excellent editor of Self, not because she herself was a “guru,” but because she struggles with the same issues that the gurus on her staff intend to solve. In an effort to illustrate her everywoman status, Danziger spoke about her tendency to binge-eat, her constant obsession with thinness, and her celebration of her loss of 25 pounds in 18 months (she had learned to control her psychological rumination, she said). She also described the “negative editorializing in [her] head,” her constant worry that she should have been “thinking about Haiti.”

Danziger’s psychological model is hardly universal. While she herself may suffer from these afflictions, they are not necessarily ones that plague all women. Not every woman needs to allay a lurking suspicion that she shouldspend more time devoted to big issues and less time fretting over her personal life. Indeed, it’s an individual’s prerogative to concern herself with Haiti and other major catastrophes. Danziger also complained about worrying about a fight with her daughter while she was in a board meeting, claiming that she was inappropriately bringing one “room,” that is to say, one realm of her life, into another. But it is not the case, as she claimed, that distraction from home is an almost exclusively female issue. Neither is it the case that every woman ought to focus all of her emotional energy on the task at hand.

The cover of the book features a cartoon of a slim white woman in a slinky red dress and heels. She has perfectly coiffed straight hair and bangs. In one image, she leaps with joy, her arms in a Vegas v above her head; in another, she has the (literal) key to her house of happiness in her hand and a large pink bag on her arm; in a third she kicks one leg behind her in a parody of female bliss. It’s telling that the authors chose a cartoon to portray the psychological life of women. Like Self magazine, The Nine Rooms of Happiness claims that it’s just being honest about women’s concerns while insidiously dictating what those concerns should be.

Danziger and Birndorf propose to treat women’s problems with precisely the close-minded, gendered sensibility that created those problems in the first place. Their fluffy medicine may produce a warm feeling in some, but it can hardly be applauded as “self-help.” It’s just another form of the role-reinforcing “help” that women get all the time from the outside world.

Annie Atura is a junior in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

Moscow Metrow bomber Dzhennet Abdullayeva poses with her husband Umalat Magomedov, before his death.

By ANNIE ATURA

April 6, 2010

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is panicking over the female suicide bombers who killed 38 and injured more than 60 on March 29. The authorities are troubled by the realization that the bombers belong to a movement: the “Black Widows, ” who have terrorized Chechnya for a decade. So named for the assumption that they are acting to avenge brothers, husbands, fathers and sons killed by Russian troops, the Black Widows have become a symbol of both independence and subservience, strength and weakness in a country that perceives its own destiny to be in the hands of unsympathetic foreigners.

Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova, one of the individuals responsible for the March 29 bombing, was the 17-year-old widow of a militant leader killed last year. Her accomplice at press time is thought to be Markha Ustarkhanova, 20 years old, and also a widow.

Nearly every month for the past two years, a Chechen has gone through with a suicide bombing. The recent subway bombing in Moscow is only the latest in a string of similar attacks – and, as with Chechen suicide bombings, Russian authorities have tried to chalk up the acts of desperation to Islam.

Yet the evidence suggests otherwise. There were 27 attacks from June 2000 to November 2004, and no attacks between then and October 2007. The 18 attacks that have taken place since then have been driven by the Russian effort to stamp out the remaining militants altogether via a counterterrorism offensive. This effort has exacerbated the problem. Russian authorities have abducted and imprisoned suspects and inspired support for their activities. Forced confessions have been rumored; suspects’ family houses have been burned. In February 2009, The New York Times reported extensive use of torture and execution in Russia’s counter-terrorism efforts.

Women play an unusually active role in the conflict. Since 2000, 43 different suicide bombings have been undertaken in the name of Chechnya’s liberation, involving 63 individuals – 40 percent of whom were female. Of the 43 people whose birthplaces are known, 38 were native to the Caucasus. The most deadly attack by a Black Widow to date was the coordinated bombing of two passenger flights in August 2004, which took 90 lives. Until the Russians’ counterterrorism offensive, the extremism of such attacks had diminished public support for the suicide bombers. The 2004 Beslan school massacre undertaken by Chechan extremists left hundreds of Russian children dead, to the detriment of the Chechan separatist cause. As a separatist spokesman said, “A bigger blow could not have been dealt on us. People around the world will think that Chechens are beasts and monsters if they could attack children.”

The desperation that led to the suicide bombings began in 1999, when the Russians invaded Chechnya and killed 30,000 to 40,000 civilians of a population of about a million. The first suicide attack took place in 2000 – and its perpetrators were female. On June 7, Khava Barayeva and Luiza Magomadova drove into a Russian Special Forces unit with a truck laden with explosives.

Women tend to be more effective than men in Chechnyan suicide bombings, killing an average of 21 people per attack, compared to 13 for males, according to The New York Times. They also tend to assume more risky missions; they travel inconspicuously to their targets, according to a July 2003 investigative report by the Russian magazine Kommersant-Vlast. Chechen women have carried out 8 of the 10 suicide attacks in Moscow.

Yet women’s assumption of the role of suicide bomber has not necessarily corresponded with a shift in opinion surrounding gender roles. Barayeva couched the reasoning behind her attack in gendered language – but she did not by any stretch of the imagination speak from a feminist perspective. In her martyr video, she exhorted Chechen men to “not take the woman’s role by staying at home.”

Another Chechnyan fighter, named Rosa, described her embarrassment about taking on the trappings of a male fighter: “At first, when the commander told me to put on fatigues I couldn’t do it. Then I obeyed him but put a skirt over the trousers,” she said, according to a report by The Toronto Star.

Any misdirected feminism at work beneath the surface of the bombings has been further subverted by popular assumptions regarding the attacks’ motivation. Despite clear evidence of unrest within Chechnya, the Kremlin has been quick to claim that the women were being actively exploited by (male) terrorists from abroad: “This is absolutely not characteristic of Chechens,” said Aslanbek Aslakhanov, a member of the Russian parliament. “Men never send their women to fight in wars. There is no religious aspect to this – it’s psychological … terrorists exploiting the misfortune of these women.” Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has called the male coordinators who planned the most recent bombings “beasts,” and announced, “We will find and destroy them all.”  Responsibility, however, may be difficult to allocate.

The Russians are deeply threatened by the idea that women are being drawn into the fight. The presence of females in the separatist movement seems to prove that the Russians’ control of Chechnya isn’t so beneficent, after all: if even women are fighting, the assumption goes, then Russian violence has permeated the home. This is not a characterization that the Russians are eager to assume, and it’s only natural that officials would attempt to shift attention back to the public sphere by claiming that the Black Widows are merely unconscious pawns in a political game.

By their very epithet, the Black Widows are defined by their male loved ones’ deaths and political intentions. Some feminists might insist that these women were independent actors,  and reject any reassignment of responsibility. It’s unclear how the women themselves saw it– whether their desperation was a peculiarly “feminine” one, whether they were proud of their unusual role as female militants (as suggested by a photo of Dzhennet Abdullayeva in which she poses defiantly with her husband and her gun), or whether their terrorism was, to them, ultimately genderless. Imagining these terrorists’ perspectives is an uncomfortable exercise– no more uncomfortable, though, than Russia’s pat dismissal of their crimes.

Annie Atura is a junior in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

April 1, 2010

This past week illuminated yet another instance of the health care system’s unsavory influence on women’s health decisions: on Tuesday, the National Center for Health Statistics released a report detailing the inappropriate increase in Caesarean sections over the past decade, due in no small part to hospital policy. The New York Times has reported that medical corporations’ fear of malpractice suits has encouraged these lengthy – and expensive – procedures, despite evidence that suggests that Caesarean sections often favor the baby’s health at the expense of its mother’s. The increase has affected all racial and ethnic groups, in all ages of mothers, in every state.

The latest report from the National Center for Health Statistics (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db35.pdf) found that in 2007 (the most recent year data is available), 32% of babies were delivered via Caesarean section. That statistic is a high-water mark for surgical deliveries in the United States, and makes C-sections the most common surgical procedure performed in American hospitals. The report found that the highest rates of Caesarean births occurred in New Jersey and Florida, and the lowest in Utah and Alaska.

We often consider surgical births to be less painful or dangerous than vaginal births, and in many cases C-sections do indeed save mothers and babies alike. But according to the World Health Organization, about half of the C-sections currently performed in the United States are inappropriate. The organization has estimated that surgery is proper in only about 15% of deliveries.

The spike in C-sections has been spurred in no small part by the fear that the uteruses of mothers who have already undergone a Caesarean will rupture under the pressure of a vaginal birth, particularly around the seam of the incision. Fewer than 10% of mothers who have previously had a C-section deliver vaginally, and their surgeries account for 40% of the total of C-sections in the United States. Some hospitals even mandate C-sections for such women. Yet a panel convened by the National Institutes of Health found earlier this month that such barriers were unjustified by medical concerns, and suggested that hospitals publish their rates of vaginal births so that women would know the institution’s policy on mandated C-sections. Women could then weigh the risk of a ruptured uterus against an increased likelihood of complications.

Some blame the unprecedented popularity of surgery on the increasing median age of pregnancy, or on the likelihood of a mother having already undergone a Caesarean. Surprisingly, however, the largest proportional increase in surgical births has been found in mothers under the age of 25. C-sections can subject these younger women to a litany of future problems, including ruptures during future pregnancies and an increased risk of abnormalities in the placenta, which leads to hemorrhaging and potential hysterectomy. Complications occur more frequently during surgery than during vaginal births, and women who undergo surgery during delivery are more likely to remain in the hospital with such complications. In problem cases, C-sections may make it difficult or impossible for women to choose to have large families.

Why, then, do doctors choose to operate twice as often as they should? Cynics will notice that C-sections generally cost twice as much as vaginal births. The World Health Organization has been quick point out that the profitability of C-sections may be the cause of the ridiculously high rate of surgical birth in China, where half of mothers undergo surgery. The same logic may apply here in the States.

The increase might also be attributed to a fear of malpractice lawsuits; the scientific journal Obstetrics and Gynecology published a study last month that found that 29% of its polled members reported performing more C-sections to avoid being sued when a vaginal birth went wrong. 8% of OB/GYNs had chosen to stop delivering babies, and a third of that portion said they had done so because of liability issues.

In other cases, inductions are at fault – mothers induced into labor (i.e. given drugs that prematurely begin the process of labor) are more likely to have C-sections. Obstetricians have reported the advent of “social inductions,” when mothers effectively chose their date of labor for reasons unrelated to their health. This poses a whole new set of issues; women may feel pressure to subject themselves to unnecessary risk in order to deliver on weekends or in the presence of family.

In the debate over the effect that politics and insurers have on women’s access to abortion, we might also cast a critical eye on institutional impacts on women’s health decisions at large. In the case of Caesareans, both a reform in policy and a raise in awareness are in order. Women may not realize the more questionable aspects of this surgical procedure, which is currently performed at twice the recommended rate – and which is growing more popular still.

Annie Atura is a junior in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

Photo: Yale Repertory Theatre

by ANNIE ATURA

December 2009

Eclipsed is an excruciating tearjerker, which suggests that playwright Danai Gurira felt an urgency of message.  Yet it’s also an adamant purveyor of futility and moral vertigo. Gurira says, “I went to Liberia to allow the women who endured a treacherous war to speak to me and eventually through me.” This claim is disturbing enough in itself, but its presumption is compounded by the play’s shallowness.

The playwright evades moral judgment by providing facile pop-psychology explanations for each woman’s proclivity for extreme jealousy, compassion, and fear.  Why are the wives depicted so bewildered and vulnerable?  Well, each of them has been raped, each of them has been forcibly separated from her family, and each of them has, through yet another rape, become the de facto wife of a general. Who can blame them, then, for any clichéd neuroses they have developed? The women are laughably paradigmatic, suspiciously distinct, like sitcom characters. Each is a walking case study in dealing with the aggressor, and as such they function as a manifestation of the playwright’s musings, not as a way of questioning them.  The play is a snapshot, not a story.

The women are laughably paradigmatic, suspiciously distinct, like sitcom characters. Each is a walking case study in dealing with the aggressor…

None of the women portrayed prove capable of seeing their abuse as a product anything but fate. Yet they recite pat affirmations of love to one another, which pass for insight in the context of the play.  We are meant to believe that the women have been totally closed down by their circumstantial domination, and also to believe that they lead richly emotional lives. They are apparently incapable of seeing men as people, but also incapable of selfishness. None of them has the least bit of trouble with unethical behavior in the abstract, but each leaps to love when presented with a struggling creature in the flesh. Why do they continue to respond predictably to emotional stimuli?  The exposition of each woman’s story reaffirms the playwright’s apparent conviction that only the sentimental, feminine attachment to cute babies and mamas is capable of ending the cycle of violence.

The conceit of the play is in itself problematic.  Four women are stuck in a compound in the service of a warlord for whom they act as “wives” for the duration of the war.  No man enters the stage; we meet only these four wives, together with a very womanly and bizarrely calm peacekeeper who blows onto the scene unexplained.  The absence of men is probably the most telling aspect of the play.  The playwright excludes the domineering men to enhance the audience’s relationship to the women, who exist in a hermetically sealed universe and purportedly understand one another more deeply than the men in their lives ever could. Yet this separation highlights not only the men’s failure to understand the women, but the women’s utter lack of effort in making themselves understood to the men who control them.  The wives spend the play waving their arms and squawking at one another in a crude, accented English.  They yelp about violence and injustice in an embarrassingly essentialized “compound” in which even the director has trouble finding excuses to keep their hands busy.

The characters’ only hope, their only ethical touchstone, is their quintessential and unremitting maternal instinct…

The human rights abuses committed against these women are plainly repugnant.  The women’s motivations are made embarrassingly transparent (not all insecurities are so simply accounted for), and certainly aren’t selectively opaque to men.  The playwright presupposes that women must work exclusively with one another, because interaction with men may only be undertaken on men’s terms.  This premise renders any broader effort on the women’s part futile; they are at their best comforting one another and standing in the way of the guns.  The play implies that men are dumb and soulless, the perpetrators of evil, shells of humans with frightening penises protruding.  They won’t stop raping our daughters until women find a way to stop them. If so, it’s understandable that the women may only respond by compromising either their integrity or their physical safety.

The characters’ only hope, their only ethical touchstone, is their quintessential and unremitting maternal instinct: the stoic elder takes care of the other wives, the peacekeeper is actually motivated by a search for her kidnapped daughter, the chatty airhead actually has a baby, and the newcomer abandons soldiering because she can’t bear to watch her comrades rape enemy girls. Only one woman isn’t looking out for little ones: the evil, brainwashed convert to the dark side, a bony woman who wears the colors of Old Glory, quotes Tupac, and unabashedly “loves on” certain powerful men in order to curry favor.  The play offers women as a beacon of hope only because of their primal impulse to keep peace in the hearth.  This impulse is cute or moving, and there were plenty of sniffles and bravoes in the seats around me.  Yet nurturing shouldn’t be proffered as some antidote to masculinity. Rather, it should be considered merely human.  Empathy is merely human. And, above all, instinct should not function as a last-ditch stand-in for ethics– much less when that instinct is exclusively and problematically attributed to one sex.

Annie Atura is a junior in Yale College.