Speed Blogging, Fri Sep 6, 2013: On Exclusion, Reproduction, Legos and Elections.

1.  Worth reading:  How Women's Voices Were Excluded from the March on Washington.  This is not uncommon in any social justice movement or any political movement, at least in the past.  The default position for women is to serve as the gals' auxiliary, and if women have special concerns or goals they are told to wait for those until the more important goals are met.  But all this is much better than the right-wing religious movements which explicitly exclude women.  But then the exclusion of women is often one of their major objectives.

Still, even the progressive movement can do better.  And feminism can do better in terms of inclusion of people from different ethnic and racial groups and social classes, as has been recently extensively discussed on the Internet.

2.  In Turkey, the Prime Minister Erdogan wants Turkish women to have at least three children each, preferably five.

Mmm.  Reproduction is usually treated differently from production.  If some country wants to increase production, it doesn't just tell that this is so.  It gives the firms and workers incentives to do so, and mostly that is money or similar incentives.  But when it comes to the hard work of reproduction, women are just expected to open the faucet more or less, as per the commands!

It is this differential treatment which tells me pretty clearly how women's roles in reproduction are viewed.  Both Erdogan and the US right wing want to make women (at least some women) have more children, and the way to do that is by using the stick, not by handing out carrots.  Thus, Erdogan wants to limit access to abortion and so do the US right-wingers.   To force women, in short.

3.  The Lego toy company has come out with a female scientist mini-figure.  She isn't even pink or frilly!

4.  Finally, something quite fun (via Gromit):  A German election ad video.