Well, in late 2008, I’d tried to renew our former domain name shortly before it expired but I encountered some technical difficulties and was unable to complete the transaction. I notified the domain registrar via their tech support contact form and waited to hear back. By the time they got back to me, the domain name had expired and been sold to a third party who wanted me to buy it back from domain name purgatory for a large sum of money.

Not taking kindly to extortion, I contacted the domain registrar (a large company who shall remain unnamed even though I think they’re horrible, evil people) again and plead our case but they refused to step in and right this wrong.

In the interim, someone else bought the domain name and threw up a hideous and very poorly written web site using our domain name. Regretfully, anyone still displaying our button continues to send them traffic to this day. Grrrr!

After stewing over this for well over a year and trying to think of ways to get the name back, I finally decided to just move our old content to a new domain and here we are!

There were a few database glitches that were out of our control so a lot of posts are missing images and there may even be a few posts gone—I can’t tell for sure—but nonetheless, we are BACK!

I’m not sure what direction I want to take Moms Speak Up but I’m leaning towards having an open posting format where anyone can submit a post through a form and it will be posted, as a post, immediately. This will allow anyone who has something to say (spammers notwithstanding) to say it whenever they feel like it without going through all the hassle of setting up a guest post or committing to a permanent writers position.

Regardless of what I decide to do with the site, my original desire to get the content back up has been fulfilled and all the moms who have spoken up will continue to be heard!

I wrote one of them last year.

That was before I read So Sexy So Soon by Diane E. Levin, Ph.D. and Jean Kilbourne Ed.D. which clearly explained that girls haven’t become hyper-sexualized at all. Marketers and Advertisers have become hyper-sexualized in an attempt to exploit children’s inherent innocent sexuality for profit.

This year when I went to Amazon Associates to look at their Halloween Widgets I saw the hyper-sexual photos of girls’ costumes and instead of being angry that girls have become too sexualized . . .

This year, I thought this has nothing to do with our GIRLS.

This is MARKETING.

The girls did not become sexier – the marketing started encouraging girls to buy sexier products. There is a huge difference.

Girls had nothing to do with this.

Parents had nothing to do with this.

* My daughter didn’t make the costume. The Costume company did.

* Your daughter didn’t dress another little girl in the costume and put her photo on Amazon for everyone to freak out over. The Marketer did.

* Parents didn’t pose the girl model provocatively for the photograph on the packaging that resembles child pornography.The photographer did.

* I, as a mother, am not marketing provocative costumes for my child to wear. I’m not even buying those costumes and if I could convince other parents to wake up to bad marketing intentions other parents wouldn’t buy it either.

All the hype is marketing.

This type of marketing is incredibly disrespectful to all girls. It’s incredibly disrespectful to parents.

It’s intentionally closer and closer to pornography because of the fundamental marketing premise “sex sells.” Even innocent children are attracted to sexual imagery. That doesn’t make them less innocent, it makes them human.

Girls and their parents should be so angry that marketers would stoop to this level that we should STARVE them out. Do. Not. Buy. These. Costumes!

This is exploitation of girls in marketing for profit.

What are girls REALLY wearing on Halloween?

Are they all in touch with their “inner Lolita” as this marketing, and the inflammatory news reporting about the marketing, suggests?

I don’t know. I suspect not. Let’s find out.

Email me (traceesioux@yahoo.com) a photo of your daughter’s Halloween Costume by Oct. 31 and you are entered to win.

I’ll publish them on Empowering Girls: So Sioux Me and we’ll just see –

- Have our daughters really become hyper-sexual or are we allowing marketers to project that identity on them and sully their reputations?

Seagate has offered to give one Empowering Girls: So Sioux Me reader a FreeAgent GO sleek portable hard drives worth $150.

I’ll choose the best costume and that person will win the prize.

Oh and make sure you subscribe to Empowering Girls: So Sioux Me because we’re going to focus on how to create a meaningful and joyful holiday season without touching a credit card or giving our hard-earned money to companies who disrespect girls.

More giveaways at the Bloggy Giveaways Quarterly Carnival!

I wrote:

In other women’s rights trampling, the Bush Administration is doing the quick step to achieve as many of its oppressive agenda points as possible before the President’s term ends.

This week’s big move?

Removing the blockade and letting anti-choice activists storm the health care castle in order to not only block women from getting abortions that are, for the record, still legal, but also could classify contraception products as abortions and enable “objectors” to prevent women from accessing those too. They call it “preventing discrimination” in hiring on the basis of “religious belief” but it’s clear—after reading all 39 pages of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed rule document—what it really is: trying to cut the legs out from under Roe v. Wade.

What does the document say? (Click here to read the complete PDF, provided courtesy of RH Reality Check.)

I then went on to summarize and wrote:

Another good question is why the 39 page HHS document provides no measures for patient protection, or a guarantee that if one health care practitioner refuses to provide requested health care, another who will provide it will be made available to the patient.

Clearly the goal is to force health care to hire anti-choice people who will put their own beliefs and interests above the patients’ and who will block access to basic legal health care. Good medicine and good health care is not the goal. Choking the religious rights’ anti-choice agenda down patients’ throats is.

It’s shocking that HHS, which is supposed to be dedicated to providing better health services to people in the US, would instead put a religious belief, which is a matter of opinion, above health care, which is a matter of scientific fact and law. Does it seem that this new rules proposal is achieving the HHS goals?

Let’s not be naive. This is not about protecting fundamental freedom of belief. This is not about protecting people from discrimination. This is patently and clearly—and if you don’t believe me, go read each of the articles I linked to and the original document from HHS—about putting anti-choice health care workers into protected positions so that they may block women’s access to legal and necessary reproductive health care.

My friend, the impressive Cynthia Samuels, recently reminded me about this issue and the hard work many women and groups are doing to protect women’s right to make choices about reproduction and their bodies.

Her letter speaks very plainly and explains this issue straightforwardly—including why you need to care, even if you do not believe in abortion:

Cynthia wrote:

It’s critical that people know about it before the election because access to legal contraceptive is being challenged on many fronts. If you agree that making many forms of birth control illegal is a horrifying idea, then you want our presidential candidates, and those for local offices too, to declare their positions on these issues. I am helping Birth Control Watch, a website established to make this information, and tools to counter it, available, to reach out to bloggers and, of course, I’ve started with you.

Please take the time to visit the site and, hopefully, write about what you find there. If you’ve ever read The Handmaid’s Tale, you know how dire this is. Here’s the information:

Our access to legal birth control is at risk.

From proposed new HHS Regulations:

The Bush Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) wants to threaten patient’s access to health services and information by greatly expanding existing laws intended to govern the right to deny women access to most forms of birth control.

From an unimaginable Colorado Ballot Referendum

A constitutional amendment proposed for the 2008 Ballot in Colorado seeks to establish legal personhood from the moment of fertilization. Changing Colorado’s constitution to grant fertilized eggs (a biological stage that, according to medicine, doesn’t even constitute a pregnancy) could prohibit the use of the most effective forms of birth control, restrict in-vitro fertilization, end embryonic stem cell research and more.

From vicious disinformation campaigns

One of the most creative attacks on birth control is the claim contraception can cause abortion. “The Pill Kills” is a campaign led by anti-contraceptive groups to try to confuse the public, using scientific–sounding arguments, that hormonal contraception can terminate a pregnancy. Contraception does not terminate a pregnancy, only prevents one. The “pro-life” movement’s own most-respected medical experts have implored the movement’s leaders to stop making these inaccurate claims.

There are other issues too – abstinence-only education and the lack of protection for women whose pharmacists refuse to fill birth control prescriptions.

Again, please take a look; it’s important that candidates make their views known on these issues.

No.

No, men and politicians do not get to make my health choices for me. They do not get to make my reproductive choices for me. They do not get to legislate my moral choices, nor (and most importantly) do they get to tell me other people’s religious and moral choices are more important than mine and thus they get to trample my rights.

Never again.

Suggested additional reading:

My original article

The complete PDF of the proposed HHS rule changes

RH Reality Check

New York Times article on this issue (a must-read)

Cynthia Samuels Don’t Gel Too Soon

A Little Pregnant: Why no one with a uterus should vote for John McCain

Ask people with children what most shapes their worldview, and being a parent would likely be high on the list. And yet we don’t make our political decisions as “parents,” don’t base our vote on the candidates views of how to help families juggle life and work, don’t see parents as an interest group.

Uh, maybe we should email her a link to Moms Speak Up?  Or MOMocrats? Or Activistas? Or PunditMom?

She points out, as Moms Rising has been doing recently, that the three debates thus far have not included one single specifically work-family question. Seems to reinforce the premise that we parents don’t vote as parents, but rather as our other (ha!) selves. 

Belkin includes a gem of a resource in her blog: links to two one-hour conversations that rockstar women & family advocate Ellen Galinsky had with both Presidential campaigns.  Yowzah.  Listen to her talking with the Obama campign here and McCain here.  She summarizes the outcome like this:

Broadly summarized, Obama supports an expansion of the rights of working parents and the role of the Federal government in securing those rights and McCain supports making the case to business that such changes are in their interest.

Worth a read, me thinks, if you are on the fence or have some convincing to do in the coming weeks.  Do you vote as a parent, or as another being??  Do tell, because I definitely look at public policy through my parent lens these days.  How can I not?

While reading this little piece, I squinted my eyes thinking that surely this is not the story I am reading.  Surely, our society has accepted that breastfeeding is natural and the preferred way to nourish our infants.

At least twice, the AP used the word “apparent” in referring to Jolie’s breastfeeding.  So, here is my question.  Is the big news that she might be breastfeeding or that she is actually breastfeeding?  Or is the big news that this is a news story at all?

What’s going on with paid family leave in your state?  The National Partnership for Women & Families has a great summary of state and local action on paid family and medical leave for 2008.  In our experience, bringing the grassroots energy and perspective to the table is a critical part of enacting strong legislation that really works for families.  So jump in!

 Photo courtest of Sarah Gilbert, aka cafemama.

Interested in knowing more?  Getting involved?  Visit the group’s ‘For Parents‘ web page for some great tips on reducing your family’s exposure to toxic chemicals.  It doesn’t have to be hard.

ps – When I’m not writing for Moms Speak Up and Activistas, I work for EWG, so buyer beware.

As my husband was preparing the oatmeal for breakfast this morning, he wondered idly how a person would go about converting grain into oatmeal for cooking. Not that we are worried about where our next meal is coming from, but as he related this story to me later, I reminded him that there have been more than a few instances of bare grocery shelves in our neck of Canada since early summer. Times have arisen when I wasn’t able to buy soy cheese or whole grain bread or even bagels because the store was waiting on a truck to arrive – sometimes for a week or longer.

Even now there are signs that food shortages are not just something that happen in third world countries. Some staples of our diet, veggie ground chicken for instance, haven’t been available for months and no one knows when – or if – we will see it again.

Prices are higher and still rising, and despite the fact that the decline in U.S. gasoline consumption is dropping every month, we are still paying close to $5 Canadian for a gallon of the stuff up here.

We consider ourselves fortunate to not be in the U.S. My husband had almost taken a transfer to the Houston branch of his company about six months ago. But distance from the States is not insulation from the downward spiraling economy.

Credit is tightening. The housing market is bottoming. Jobs are still available but fewer and fewer are seeking unskilled labor. Prices are climbing. It’s hard not to wonder if this isn’t the beginning of  a depression as great as that one of yore. You remember, that big one back in 1929. The one we read about in school.

And that’s kind of the problem. We don’t remember. We only read about it in school.

The Time Magazine cover story this week explores the crisis now and compares it to the circumstances of  1929.  Although most people believe the cause of the Great Depression was the stock market collapse, the truth is that the crash was merely a big fat straw on the back of an already over-extended camel. The true cause was then, as now, a failure of the banking system and a contraction of credit.

Much like now, the unwillingness or inability of banks to short term lend to each other and businesses led to a vicious cycle of bank and business failures which affected the average person much more than the crash on Wall Street.

Our inability to borrow money is what caused the first depression, and we are perilously close to that again. Barbara Kiviat, in her piece Need A Loan, outlines very clearly the impact of tight credit on people like you and I. Money access we took for granted not long ago is now non-existent for many, and harder and harder to come by for the rest of us.

So what will happen now? I don’t think anyone really knows although a recent CNN Poll shows that about 60% of Americans believe that a depression is likely. Current unemployment rates would have to double or triple to put us into a true depression, but the signs for a long and painful recession are everywhere.

One of the gloomiest predictions for this upcoming week came courtesy of James Kunstler, the author of The Long Emergency and A World Made By Hand. His blog post paints a picture not unlike the one depicted by Matthew Simmons . During one of his visits to CNBC’s Fast Money back in July of this year, Simmons talked about how a gasoline/diesel shortage would bring about a total restructuring of our culture.

A Simmons-like world might well be in the offing but it seems that the more likely culprit will be the financial over-extension of not just the “fat cats” on Wall Street or government spending, but our own mismanagement of credit.

From a personal perspective, my husband and I have little debt but like most people our money is in banks and CD’s and our retirements are at the mercy of the stock market. I don’t think we will have to ponder a future of homemade oatmeal the hard way, but I don’t believe in the great American Dream anymore either.

Do you?

“Kids close your eyes!”

How many times do you find yourself trying to protect your children from harmful and destructive images while watching family television?

Two years ago, while watching television, I was assaulted with an image of a woman wearing a see-through nightgown, nipples protruding and visible, erotic soft lighting, floating in a bathtub. It was intentionally erotic, except that she had been violently and bloodily murdered and this erotic woman was, in fact, dead.

“What the heck is going on?” I thought. “Why are my children and I being subjected to this kind of sexually violent imagery in a commercial?”

So, I wrote the FCC. The Federal Communications Commission used to be the people who governed our airwaves. They used to control when and what was allowed to air during times when children were expected to be viewing television. Remember when they wouldn’t let radio stations play George Michael’s, I Want Your Sex?

Many months later they wrote back.

“Each network or television station has control over what it airs during commercials. You’ll have to write each network to complain about every commercial you feel is inappropriate,” they informed me.

“What? Who made that stupid rule?” I wanted to know.

And now that I’ve read So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids, by Diane Levin Ph.D and Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D, I know who made that stupid rule.

As a point of fact and matter of record it was specifically: Ronald Reagan who got the “deregulation of the media” rolling. George H.W. Bush furthered the problem with the telecommunications act of 1996.

The euphemism for more sex and violence on TV is “deregulation of the media.”

Sounds innocuous doesn’t it?

Essentially, deregulation means fewer laws. Fewer laws governing what? What companies can sell and who they can sell it to, when they can run an ad, and what the ads’ message can contain.

The motive? To stimulate the economy allowing telecommunications companies more freedom to make more money.

To that end, deregulation has been a fantastic success.

Companies spend about $17 Billion annually marketing to children, a
staggering increase from the $100 Million spent in 1983, according to Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

Unfortunately, their freedom to make more money by advertising whatever they like in front of whichever audience they buy airtime for – is infringing on my freedom and my children’s freedom to not be subjected to sexualized violence and objectification of people on television.

This is especially upsetting to me in regards to commercials where I, and children who don’t know better, are a CAPTIVE AUDIENCE and there is no implied consent, as there is when choosing to watch a sexual or violent movie or TV show.

Did Ronald Reagan mean for deregulation of the telecommunication industry, including children’s television, to result in hyper-sexualized and all-too violent advertising for children? Was this his intention?

Was it the intent of the George H.W. Bush and Congress in Telecommunications Act of 1996 to further open the floodgates for marketers to legally target children, instead of targeting their ads at parents?

WHO CARES?

This is the result. This is where we’re at.

I know for a fact the religious conservatives who voted for them would not have been in favor of such legislation if they had understood the kinds of sexual and violent imagery which would be coming at children from every direction. But, again, who cares?

It is from here we have to make a choice. Do we want to allow this kind of thing and all its consequences on our culture, our children and our own minds to continue?

I was just reading in A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles” by Marriage Williamson, this morning, the definition of one of the most beautiful miracles – Changing Our Mind.

The fundamental change will occur with the change of mind in the thinker.

We can change our minds.

Right now. There are numerous bills before Congress that would re-regulate our children’s media and make parents, as opposed to marketers the primary influence over our children’s minds. Visit Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood for direct links to find out about the bills and send letters directly to representatives.

Stay tuned we’ll get into the ideas presented in So Sexy So Soonand the practical steps to change our own minds, our schools, our culture and our media’s influence over the role of sex in our children’s lives.

Subscribe to this RSS feed so you’re sure not to miss the So Sexy So Soon Series on Empowering Girls: So Sioux Me.

More details about my contact with the FCC in Misogynistic Violence for Breakfast

A consortium of television networks has once again decided not to let the Green Party participate in the nationally televised debates for this election.

I call bullshit.

The consortium announced on Monday (as reported at the National Post):

Three parties opposed the Greens inclusion in the debate, the consortium said in a news release, “and it became clear that if the Green party were included, there would be no leaders’ debates.”

(Three parties, meaning everyone but the Liberals, I should add.) The Green Party has a lot of support in Canada, and it deserves to be heard by the same audience as the other three major parties, as well as the Bloc Quebecois. Over 660,000 Canadians voted for this party in the last federal election. Does it sound right to you that they are being excluded?

I want to hear Elizabeth May take on Harper and Dion and Layton…she’s earned the right. It’s undemocratic to shut her out.

If you agree, head on over to Demand Democratic Debates, a site the Green Party has set up to allow Canadians to join in their fight to participate in the nationally televised debates. The petition will be sent to the presidents of the major Canadian networks, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council and the Canadian Association of Broadcasters. There you can sign a petition demanding Ms. May be heard at the debates. There’s also a section for bloggers, where you can grab a badge to help the Green Party’s efforts.

(For a concise run-down of where each party stands with respect to environmental issues, head on over to BlogHers Act Canada to read my post, Go Green or Go Home: Canadian Election 2008.)

(Cross-posted at Assertagirl.)