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The House of Representatives has adopted changes to its standing rules that include thirteen pages of amendments replacing terms like “he,” “him,” and “his” with gender-neutral language.
I’m particularly pleased by the change of “chairman” to “chair,” outlined here:
(1) In the standing rules —
(A) strike “chairman” each place it appears and insert “chair”; and
(B) strike “Chairman” each place it appears and insert “Chair” (except in clause 4(a)(1)(B) of rule X).
As someone who’s spent a lot of time over the years in academia and activist circles, I’ve chaired my share of meetings, committees, and boards, and it seems like I always have at least one well-intentioned colleague to whom insisting on referring to chairs as chairmen is a point of honor.
I’ve never been a chairman of anything. I’ve always referred to myself as a chair. But I’ve found “chairman,” sitting as it does at the place where process geekery and language geekery collide, one of the toughest bits of gender-exclusive language to dislodge.
So the next time that comes up, this will be a nice data point to have on my side. If “chair” is good enough for Barney Frank, John Conyers, and Henry Waxman (not to mention Louise Slaughter and Nydia Velasquez), it’s good enough for me.
(If you’re curious about why clause 4(a)(1)(B) of Rule X was an exception, by the way, it refers to “the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.”)
About a week ago, this story made the rounds.
A professor at the University of Michigan answered an ad on craigslist for sexual services placed by a woman who turned out to be a U of M law student. In the course of the encounter that followed, he hit her with a belt and slapped her face. She went to the cops, he claimed it was all consensual. The cops refused to charge him with assault, instead charging them both with misdemeanor offenses relating to the transaction itself, and one local (non-campus) cop made an extremely offensive public comment ridiculing the woman who had been beaten for going to the police.
I didn’t post about the story at the time because I didn’t have much of an angle on it, and because it’s often hard to know what to make of a crime story when it first breaks. It wasn’t clear what action the university was taking, or planning to take, for instance.
But now the law student has spoken out, and her statement is very much worth reading. Here it is.
The parents of two Washington State cheerleaders are suing their daughters’ high school for suspending them from the squad after nude photographs of the students began to circulate in the school. The students say that the two photos were distributed inadvertently.
The families charge that school officials allowed staffers to view the photos unnecessarily and that the school should have promptly reported the incident to police as a possible child pornography case.
The lawsuit also contends that the two girls were inappropriately targeted for punishment. It notes that students who may have received or forwarded the photographs, including members of the school’s football team, were not disciplined.
A school official is quoted as saying that “when you sign up to be a cheerleader — or for any student activity — you agree to certain codes of behavior.” “We consider them student leaders,” she continued, “and we want them to be role models.”
I’d want to know more about this particular case before coming to any real conclusions about it, but it does seem to me that distributing a naked picture of a fellow student without permission is a far more serious offense than taking a picture of yourself naked. That fact leaves me sympathetic to the plaintiffs in this suit, and inclined to believe that they’re raising important questions about school policy.
Update: Having done a brief search for additional reporting on this lawsuit, I have to add that I find media outlets’ eagerness to augment their coverage of this story with photographs of cheerleaders — from this high school, in uniform, with their faces blurred out — frankly repulsive.
So the political world is buzzing right now about a photo of Obama’s chief speechwriter, the 27-year-old Jon Favreau.
In the photo, Favreau and another man are seen with a life-size cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton. Favreau is leaning in toward Clinton and smiling for the camera, like you would if you were getting your photo taken with a celebrity, but with one big difference — he’s groping the cutout’s “breast” with one hand. The other guy is kissing Clinton on the cheek and tipping a beer bottle up to her mouth.
It appears that the photo, which surfaced on Facebook not long ago, probably isn’t going to derail Favreau’s career. He has reportedly called Clinton to apologize, and Clinton’s people have put out a light-hearted statement on the incident. But the sexism and disrespect for Clinton evidenced in the photo have a lot of people fuming.
I mention all this here at studentactivism.net not because of any campus angle to this story, but because the photo reminds me powerfully of another photo — one taken more than a hundred years ago.
Columbia Law School is hosting an Alliance of Youth Movements Summit right now, with all sessions being broadcast live on the net. As the summit website puts it:
Panels will discuss a variety of practical topics, including How To Build Transnational Social Movements Using New Technology, How To Use New Mobile Technologies and How To Preserve Group Safety And Security.
Summit participants will also be honored at a red-carpet event with entertainment celebrities, business leaders, and civil society figures at the former home of MTV’s Total Request Live (“TRL”) overlooking Times Square.
Howcast will use the field manual for youth empowerment developed at the Summit as the cornerstone of a much larger online “hub,” where emerging youth organizations can access and share “how-to” guides and tips on how to use social-networking and other technologies to promote freedom and justice and counter violence, extremism and oppression. The hub will include instructional videos and text guides, links to related online resources and discussion forums for sharing experiences, ideas and advice.
The schedule for the summit is available here, with links to streaming video from every session.
studentactivism.net 
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