Jessica Valenti

Yesterday I took a trip into Toronto and met up with Christie to go and see Feministing's Jessica Valenti at a panel discussion hosted by the Miss G__ Project. The event took place at Camera Lounge on Queen St. in the "hipster" district of town. Very cool. I met Christie and her friend Sarah downtown and we had dinner (Dan happened to be downtown too, so he met up with us for a bit and that was awesome :)) and then headed over to Camera.

It was really cool to actually see Jessica and be in a room with her for a mature discussion of feminism. She started off by giving an introduction as to why she had started the feministing, and I really enjoyed learning the reason that the site was started. I was introduced to feministing by a friend, and have since loved it because I love to get me a taste of feminist discourse on current events. Essentially, Valenti started feministing because she wanted to reach a different demographic other than the privileged feminists who engage in high theory in universities. She has received much acclaim and criticism for her book "Full Frontal Feminism" because some feminists (including myself) think it's too colloquial. I also didn't have in mind that it would be so brash with the language, and I thought it was very basic. I honestly thought that Valenti's target audience was my demographic (ie: background in women's studies) but in reality, it was brilliantly for women who are still scared of the "f-word" or are feminists, yet in high school you're scared of ridicule, so this mainstream release is a god-send. However, Valenti explained last night that she intended that her books be modeled as guidebooks. They were written in order to introduce feminism to those who would not always identify as feminists, and serve as a handbook for them! It was purposely written in colloquial language so that it could be more conversational. Loved it.

Anyhow, the evening was quite wonderful, as first Jessica talked about her website and then her books and feminism, and then we moved on to a panel discussion which included members of the Miss G__ project Laurel Mitchell, Sarah Wolf, who has a background in Family and Sexuality studies from UW and has been education coordinator and acting executive director of Planned Parenthood Waterloo. There was also Jessica Yee, who is a 22-year old proud indigenous Chinese-Mohawk woman focusing her work on the sexual health of aboriginal youth. Jessica actually writes for Shameless Magazine which is the Canadian version of Feministing. How fabulous! I'm really happy to have a blog I can read which takes a decidedly Canadian perspective and discusses Canadian current events. However, I digress.

The panel discussion touched on interesting topics such as Bill 4-c84 which is an incredibly hard to understand two page long Bill. (I tried to find the text of the bill but I couldn't, so here is a fact sheet for the time being.) The Bill is the Unborn Victims of Crime act which would give fetuses human rights if a pregnant woman is murdered. This was quite interesting as homicide is the number one cause of death for pregnant women, second only to complications with birth. Anyhow, the problem with this bill is that it will cause many grey areas in the law, especially with regards to abortion- will this recriminalize abortion? Also, the bill seems pointless because in Canada we serve our sentences concurrently. So, if you get two convictions of life in prison, then you only spend 25 years in jail, not 50.

The panel also discussed issues of "mainstream" type feminism. For example: many feminists would get flack for addressing Jamie Lynne Spears' pregnancy or Amy Winehouse's crack addiction, but one guest at the event who presumably wrote for Shameless brought up the issue: when can you address these things? Shameless addressed the Jamie Lynne Spear's thing because they felt that it dealt with so many feminist issues and if we are going to try to recruit women for the feminist team, we need to address the pop culture. A "holier than thou, I am so above celebrity gossip" attitude definitely is not going to be the way to encourage our youth not to be scared of the f word.

All in all, it was a great night with lots of interesting and discussion about how to engage our youth. What I took from the night is that feminism becoming mainstream shouldn't cause us to devalue it. It's not only the academics who are feminists, and women who don't engage in high theory can also be feminists and participate in the mainstream culture (to a degree).

Good times had by all.