WHEN BEAUTY COMPETITIONS LEAD TO UGLINESS
Female beauty and religion are undergoing a tug-of-war in Malaysia. While some beauty contest winners are dissolving in tears of joy, others are being tossed out of high school.
Newspaper pictures of contest winners wearing swimsuits look markedly out of place in predominantly Muslim Malaysia. But with a mixed population of Malays (60 percent), Chinese (30 percent) and Indians (eight percent), Malaysia promotes itself as a tolerant, multicultural nation and so far beauty contests have survived.
Organisers of such contests increasingly insist it takes more than a pretty face to win. Michelle Chong, 23, named Miss Chicago in a contest run by a local advertising agency last week, was asked questions on pollution, road bullies and abandoned babies – all key local issues.
“We do not want to create a new generation of beauty queens who know nothing about the issues pertaining to their own country," organiser Catherine Moir-Bussy said.
But participation in beauty contests is not being tolerated by school officials.
Seventeen-year-old student Fahyu Hanim Ahmad was warned after emerging as a finalist in the Miss Teen Malaysia/International pageant that she could be expelled from school. But she persisted and ended up with the title along with M$ 500 (HK$ 1,500), a M$ 2,500 scholarship for further studies and a return air ticket to Costa Rica for the international pageant.
The Form Five pupil was escorted home from school by four teachers, one of whom handed an expulsion letter to her father. But she will be able to take her final exams in November.
Education Minister Najib Tun Razak said the ministry would no longer let students enter beauty contests because of "possible adverse effects".
Source: South China Morning Post, 7 August 1996
CHAD: FATWA AGAINST ZARA AND HER PRESENT CONDITION
A fatwa (death penalty) was pronounced against a young female film producer by the Mufti of N'Djamena after her film "Feminine Dilemma" was shown on public television.
Her film, which was aimed at raising awareness about female genital mutilation (FGM) in Chad, showed parts of the operation on a young girl and this brought the wrath of the most influential Muslim leader in N'Djamena.
The Inter-African Committee (IAC) along with many other associations and individuals sent letters asking for the decision to be reconsidered. A reply has been received from the government which stated that no measures are being taken against Zara and that the government has nothing against her. Recently, an association known as "Women living under Muslim laws" sent us excerpts of a letter it received from Zara in which she stated the following:
"If you hadn't stepped in, there would have been no reaction, and God knows what would have happened to me by now...
Your call for action led the President of the Republic to tell the Imam to calm down and forget this case... People's attitude has improved a lot, but there are still suspicious looks...
The situation is now calm. The hardest is past. I have stopped taking (security) precautions and am trying to regain confidence...
It is time to say thank you to all the people who helped... I am still receiving support letters."
Source: Inter-African Committee Newsletter No. 19, June 1996
BELGIUM GRIEVES DEATH OF 2 CHILD SEX VICTIMS
LIEGE, Belgium (Reuter) – Silent crowds began gathering in this eastern Belgian town ahead of the funeral of two 8-year-old girls who died while in the hands of a convicted child sex offender.
Melissa Russo and Julie Lejeune were buried after an emotional memorial service in the Saint Martin basilica in their hometown of Liege which was televised live across a shocked nation.
Up to 100,000 people are expected to attend the service which will be held after a private commemorative ceremony for the close relatives of the two friends. The burial of the two white coffins with the girls ' remains will be private too.
Those who will not be able to enter the church can follow the service on a large video screen outside.
Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer, 23 August 1996
COUPLE SLAIN FOR BEING HOMOSEXUALS
MEDFORD, Oregon – A man accused of killing a lesbian couple said he did it because he hates homosexuals and bisexuals.
Previously, Robert James Acremant had said he shot the women during a robbery that went awry, and their homosexuality made it easier.
Acremant said in a letter to his hometown newspaper, the Stockton (Calif.) Record that he invented the robbery motive because he was nervous about how other jail inmates would react.
“Now I just don't care what people think, including the jury”, Acremant, 27, wrote from the jail where he is awaiting trial on aggravated murder and related charges. “They can kill me for all I care. I've never liked life anyway”.
Trial was set for February. In the August 8 letter, Acremant also said he killed a man last year in a drunken rage after the man made a pass at him.
The bound and gagged bodies of Roxanne Ellis and Michelle Abdill were found in December in the back of a pickup truck. They had been shot in the head.
Gay community leaders expressed fears they were killed because they were outspoken champions of homosexual rights.
Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer, 23 August 1996
GAMES HELP FUEL WOMEN'S REVOLUTION
While the US men's 4 x 100 relay team was busy being trounced, their distaff counterparts were on the same track – four fast females running for gold.
Chryste Gaines, Gail Devers, Inger Miller and Gwen Torrence thus joined what became an ever increasing circle during the Olympics: women who delivered big performances and received a lot of notice for doing it.
Amy Van Dyken left the swimming pool with four gold. Kerri Strug became a poster girl for athletic fortitude.
Marie-Jose Perec of France produced the same 200 and 400 metre double that Michael Johnson did, and not much less impressively.
It would be absurd to suggest that Olympic heroines are some kind of a 1996 innovation.
Long before there was Gail Devers, there was Wyomia Tyus, and Fanny Blankers-Koen. Before Van Dyken, there was Dawn Fraser of Australia. Nadia Comanechi and Olga Korbut were gymnastics wonder kids before Strug and Dominique Dawes were born.
Still, there’s no doubt the Atlanta Games catapulted women’s sport to a new level of interest in those achievements.
"These Olympics, probably more than any before, are showing a lot of little girls it's okay to sweat, it's okay to play hard, it's okay to be an athlete", tennis gold medalist Lindsay Davenport said. “It shows how far women's athletics has come, just in my lifetime”.
Davenport was born in 1976. That year, in Montreal, 1,247 women competed in the Games. Eight years before that, in Mexico City, a total of 78 1 women participated.
In Atlanta, the number of women was an all-time high of 3,779 – or 37 percent of all athletes.
What accounts for such vast increases? To Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation, it has much to do with what Davenport referred to – a marked shift in cultural attitudes toward women in sports. It also has to do with an ever growing number of girls who are playing sports at a young age, creating what Lopiano called "a critical mass" of participants.
"The progress made to date has been made possible by the first generation of mothers and fathers whose daughters (not only) play sports but can get athletic scholarships doing it", Lopiano said.
But the biggest factor of all was the passage in 1972 of Title IX in the US, legislation that demanded men's and women's sports to be treated equally. Title IX meant scholarships. It meant increased respect, funding, opportunity.
The more that the women began to play, and play well, the more a market began to develop. Corporations saw the upward attendance curve.
They saw a chance to reach female consumers, who were not only playing, but watching, too.
Even sports that did not get huge air time flourished.
"It was another step, bigger than most", Mia Hamm said, speaking of women's soccer's Olympic debut.
"Maybe it will help start a league, give girls who want to play soccer something to look forward to".
The same can be said for a whole spectrum of women's sports at the Olympics, where change is coming faster than a Lisa Fernandez heater.
Ask Dot Richardson about that. When she was 10, Richardson wanted to play Little League Baseball. The coach said sure – just cut your hair, dress like a boy and we’ll call you Bob.
Dot discovered softball instead. The year was 1972, the same year Title IX passed, and an athletic revolution began.
Source: South China Morning Post, 7 August 1996
GANG RAPE AS PUNISHMENT
Gang rape is common practice – it is used to punish girls who have more than one boyfriend. Gang rape might even be used as "a punishment" if a girl tells her boyfriend he has passed a sexually transmitted disease (STD) on to her.
This startling information emerged from one of the workshops held with young women in Mpumalanga last year to develop the Women's Health Project workshop manual on sexually transmitted diseases.
The issue of gang rape came up during role plays in a workshop. In the workshop a "girlfriend" had to tell her "boyfriend" that she had an STD. This is followed by a role play in which the "boyfriend" discussed this information with his "friend." In this role play the "boyfriend" said: "I was so annoyed by this girl who said that it was me who made her ill. When I realised that I also have the disease, I decided to arrange a group of boys to come and rape her".
In the discussion after the role play we asked the young women whether gang rape was a reality in their community. They said gang rape happens in their community; it is a common practice especially as a punishment for a girl who has more than one boyfriend. Then young men meet and arrange that a group of men should rape such a girl.
The young women described gang rape as a method that is used to punish women "who do not behave well". They said girls "behave well" out of fear that they may be gang raped and even felt it was good that "misbehaving women get punished because it is wrong for them to make the boyfriends fools". Young women who sympathised with girls subjected to gang rape were in the minority and they also voiced their condemnation of such girls' behaviour.
While the young women said they were not scared of their boyfriends and could discuss issues with them, they also said they were not in a position to suggest the use of condoms to them. They told us: "Even if you have the condom there is nothing you can do if he does not want to use them and you cannot refuse to have sex with him because he is going to beat you up".
The young women didn't question the inequalities in relationships. They saw men as leaders who should always also be initiators.
The above issues have come up in STD and other Women's Health Project workshops. As a result of this, WHP feels that there is a need for educational materials that will address violence, health and sexuality issues.
Source: Women's Health News, May 1996, No. 18
APPROACHING MID-LIFE? READ ON
Women who reach natural menopause menstruate between 400-500 times during their lives.
Smoking can bring on an early menopause.
Japanese women have a very low rate of menopausal complaints. It is suggested that this may be due to their higher consumption of tofu (soya bean curd).
Mangoes are an anti-depressant.
Banana and lettuce calm your nerves.
Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) helps improves memory and may reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease.
Men also experience mid-life changes when the testosterone levels in their bodies decline.
Some researchers believe that testosterone treatment may prove equally effective for male patients as estrogen is to females.
Source: NEWomen NEWSletter, Winter 1996
MURDER PUTS SPOTLIGHT ON PROSTITUTION
SOUTH AFRICA – The prostitute's corpse was found buried upside down in bushes near Milnerton in November 1995, her legs and buttocks protruding above the ground.
The post mortem revealed she had probably been buried alive.
In January 1996, another body was found near Durbanville, and police announced a serial killer was on the loose in Cape Town. He had murdered at least nine prostitutes, strangling them with their clothes, and torturing three of them before they were killed.
The police have stepped up their manhunt, by forming a task force which visited prostitutes at their usual places, inviting the women to visit police stations to have their fingerprints and photos taken and their personal details recorded on a database. The information will be used to keep track of women and, if the killer is not caught, help to identify the victims.
More than 200 frightened prostitutes responded and were interviewed by police by mid-January, volunteering information about themselves and offering new clues about the killer.
This unusual cooperation between police and prostitutes has raised hopes of continued sympathy for sex workers from officialdom. However, a police spokesman said that the police would have to comply with the law, which prohibited acts of indecency for reward.
Ilse Pauw, coordinator of the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Task Group (Sweat), welcomed the police's new cooperative approach to catching the killer by working with prostitutes and said she hoped police protection would continue in the future.
The organisation was aware of numerous incidents where women prostitutes were abused by their clients. “But they tell us they can't go to the police station to report what happened to them because they were involved in an illegal activity at the time of the assault,” Pauw said. "What they want is to be taken seriously and their cases to be treated equally with other women".
While the decriminalisation of prostitution would improve the service prostitutes receive from the police, Pauw said it would probably take time to remove the stigma attached to the profession. Pauw said while police deserved credit for their effort to catch the serial killer, she had no doubt that their reaction time had been slower because the victims were prostitutes.
Pauw said while it was assumed women working street corners were more at risk, all prostitutes were vulnerable to assault or murder by their clients. "It's too simplistic to say they're safer at an agency or working from home".
"If the clients knew the women could report abuse and assaults to the police with impunity, I have no doubt sex workers' safety would improve tremendously".
Pauw said Sweat would undertake a major project this year to provide workshops to sex workers where they can discuss and learn the implications of decriminalisation, or the legislation of prostitution. "People don't always understand their options and we want to ensure they make informed choices".
Source: Mail & Guardian, 1 February 1996
WORLD MEDIA EMPIRES
The international media scene points to empires that practically determine what news is and what's not.
Among these empires is Time Warner Inc., formed by a merger of Time Inc., and Warner Communications, and is the largest media corporation in the world. It owns Time, Life, Fortune and Sports Illustrated with a worldwide readership of over 120 million. Its assets ($15.9 billion in 1994) are greater than the combined domestic product of Bolivia, Jordan, Nicaragua, Albania, Liberia, and Mali. It is also the second largest cable company in the world and one of the largest book publishers.
Last year, Time Warner merged with Turner broadcasting which further raised its combined revenues to $18.7 billion.
Reuters, established since 1849, has become the main provider of print and broadcast news from developing countries, thus determining what foreign news is. It also own part of the British Independent Television News (ITN) network and the Worldwide Television News (WTN).
News Corp. Ltd., controlled by Rupert Murdoch, has the highest newspaper circulation in Australia, almost half of the circulation in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the South and East Asian market. He controls Fox Broadcasting Network and 20th Century Fox movie studios, is part-owner of CBS/Fox video and is the world's largest distributor of videocassettes.
Wire Services
Wire services are instrumental in determining the flow of information. For decades, international news has been gathered and distributed by five major wire services: AP (US), United Press International (US), Reuters (UK); AFP (France) and TASS (Telegranfnoi Agentsvo Sovestkavo Soyuza) of the former USSR.
The dominance of these wire agencies has resulted in disproportionate coverage of first world news and a corresponding lack of interest in and/or ignorance about issues in developing nations.
News concerning the latter is mostly those concerning disasters, calamities and in general those labeled as "bad news".
Ninety percent of all global news, in fact, originates from only four countries. So it is not much of a surprise that during times of global conflicts, only one side is played up and the other conveniently portrayed as the villain. Media coverage of the Gulf War and the Panama invasion are classic examples.
Source: IBON Facts and Figures, “Who owns what?”, Vol. 19, No. ll, 15 June 1996
BARE HANDS
By Codou Bop
Women peasants play a vital though unseen, unpaid and undervalued role in agriculture.
The majority of women in the South lives and works in a rural environment where they play a vital role in agriculture, frequently a dominant sector in the economy of countries in the South. Yet, women rarely have access to credit and production means. According to an estimate by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), women's agricultural work contributes from 60 to 80 percent of food production. Apart from food, women are also present in the cash crop sector.
As if to acknowledge this vital role of women in agriculture, the year and then the decade for women were proclaimed in 1975. Policies for the integration of women in development (IWD) were initiated. The whole point was to find solutions that would do away with two major constraints on the expansion of women's activities both in rural and urban environments, namely, access to credit and to production means.
Yet, in 20 years, the status of rural women has evolved very little. Governments continue to give priority to cash crops. The inequalities between men and women continue to be ignored. These two factors have exacerbated the imbalances between the sexes, whether in decision-making, in the appointment of work and profits, or access to resources.
Unaware of Technologies
And yet, a large number of technologies aimed at easing domestic and agricultural work have been invented or modernised, including grain mills, improved cooking bobs, hydraulic pumps, wheel-barrows, trolleys, solar-ray captors, processing and conservation equipment for food products and oil extraction presses. When questioned, some women say they are unaware of these technologies. Others, on the other hand, complain about the high cost of these technologies or that the implements are difficult to use. Also, spare parts for tools and machine-tools are not always available in the countryside. The slightest breakdown is a problem and it is sometimes necessary to go to the nearest large town, or even as far as the capital located hundreds of kilometers away, to find a repairman.
Moreover, some of these technologies, because they are ill-suited or costly and are limited in use, have only resulted in increasing the workload of women. Studies also revealed that, due to the inequality of relations between the sexes, it is not always in the interest of women in some societies to gain access to technology which allows them to increases their productivity and, hence, their income. Why? Because the men who control the women keep the extra money generated in this way for themselves.
Finally, structural adjustment policies have resulted in the withdrawal of government incentives that promoted private initiatives to support women's agricultural activities. As a consequence, women are finding it even more of a problem to gain access to technology and credit. The development of popular initiatives is therefore an even more pressing item on the agenda than ever before.
Source: AIRD News, March 1996