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We are hard at work on the upgrade of all our online oeprations. It has been a long time coming - and it is a long time finishing, too. But soon, we hope, we will have new sites for your benefit. They will include new content, navigation, design, blogs, forums, and many many other new features and facilities including for basic users, for those who sign up as free members, and especially for those who sign up as supportive sustainers. The changes, in short, are enormous, which is why the upgrade is taking so long. Meanwhile, in this message, we have two articles from our top page for you. The first is by Justin Podur and titled Global Warming Confusions. Podur, who works with ZNet, has written partly in response to our times and their complexities, and partly in critical response to two recent essays, one by Alexander Cockburn, the other by David Noble. The second article is by Paula Rothenberg and titled Snatched from the Jaws of Victory: Feminism Then and Now. It criti8cally and highly insightfully addresses the current condition of both women and the women's movement. ---- Global Warming Suspicions and Confusions by Justin Podur In recent years, a number of important contributions have influenced the growing debate on global warming. Paul Baer and Tom Athanasiou's book, Dead Heat, from a few years ago, was excellent. Noam Chomsky's latest book, Failed States, mentions global warming as one of the three more urgent problems humanity faces (the others being war and the lack of democratic institutions to deal with problems). George Monbiot's new book, Heat, provides a workable set of proposals for stabilizing the climate without draconian sacrifice (except commercial flight). Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth cuts back and forth between cogent explanations of climate science and self-aggrandizement (Gore on the farm, Gore walking to the stage, Gore changing planes at the airport, Gore doing product placement typing on his Mac computer). Properly filtered, however, it provides an excellent introductory lecture on climate change. I wish that it had come from someone else, someone who hadn't vice-presided over the Iraq sanctions regime and the bombing of Yugoslavia. But the fact that Gore made it popular doesn't make it a sham. The terms of discussion for any major problem are usually set by elites, with the rest of us trying to sort out truth from falsehood and sensible policy from corporate propaganda after the fact. Scientific issues, like any issues, take work and time to understand. Those who can't take the time to delve into the issues, and no one can delve into everything, look for credible sources. To leftists, Gore is simply not a credible source. He is seen as an apologist for the powerful interests he served while in office and callous about the people who suffered under his rule. Furthermore, leftists are suspicious of any elite consensus, including a scientific one. They know that dubious science is often trotted out to state why some regressive policy or other is justified. Leftists therefore need people credible to them to go back and do what Gore and Flannery did - to explain the basics of climate science. Much of what they would explain would be the same as Gore does, and the same ways - but it would not come from a tainted source, nor would it be tainted by political campaigning. Both Baer/Athanasiou's Dead Heat and Monbiot's Heat accept the scientific consensus on global warming and do not spend much time on the basic science, leaving that field to people like Gore and popular science writers like Tim Flannery, who wrote The Weather Makers. The first problem for leftists trying to understand climate science is that they cannot trust Gore and they cannot automatically trust the scientific consensus. The next problem is that the best-known proposed solutions for dealing with the problem are flawed. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, is completely inadequate for stabilizing emissions. Carbon emissions trading and markets are designed to provide incentives to corporate emitters. Biofuels, in the form of palm oil and sugarcane plantations, are helping to displace peasants through paramilitary massacre in Colombia, contributing to dangerous food shortages, and in any case cause CO2 emissions just like fossil fuels do. If credible science is mixed with dubious pro-corporate policy, which is what Gore has to offer, leftists might feel the sensible thing to do is reject the whole package. They need not do so, however. Monbiot's book, Heat, is principally about climate policy, and what policies would be necessary in order to stabilize the climate. He is not an advocate for carbon markets, which he recognizes as providing incentives to corporate polluters. What he does advocate, as Baer & Athanasiou advocated in Dead Heat, is a per-capita emissions quota, the same for everyone in the world. If only a certain amount of total CO2 emission is compatible with a stable climate, then the right to emit ought to be the same for everyone. Baer & Athanasiou's book, and their website, ecoequity.org, discuss a stabilization policy based on a per capita emissions quota. They argue that, because people in poor countries emit much less than their right and people in rich countries emit much more, a credible stabilization policy would include both reduction of emissions in the rich countries and the reduction of global inequality. Monbiot's book focuses on feasible technological and policy changes for bringing the CO2 emissions of first-world countries down to the per-capita quota. By showing that the worst emitters could achieve the necessary reduction without significant suffering, Monbiot debunks the notion that stabilizing the climate requires brutal austerity or the continuation of third-world poverty. Monbiot is also clear on another point: that the impacts of global warming, like environmental problems in general, are not the same for everyone. Many environmentalists, including climate activists, believe that because we all have to live on the planet, we can all agree that environmental problems must be solved. But the wealthy and powerful have always been able to insulate themselves from the effects of environmental problems. They appropriate the territories and resources they want and leave others to starve or die. The hardest hit peoples, in countries like Bangladesh and Ethiopia, are those who are already suffering tremendously. Hurricane Katrina in the United States is another case of how "natural" disaster does not unite elites with people but, instead, can be used to entrench ever more regressive relations. If elites also control the parameters of discussion on a problem such as global warming, they can be expected to advocate not solving it, as they know their interests will be served regardless. If elites are advocating solutions, they will advocate solutions that will protect their interests, whether these actually solve the problem or not. Advocacy of ignoring or denying the problem is the model for parts of the petroleum industry, right-wing politicians and movements, and their PR machinery, which Monbiot calls "the Denial Industry". Advocacy of "solutions" that serve elite interests is the model for advocates of carbon markets and watered-down versions of Kyoto. This leaves leftists, who oppose elite agendas, with two options. First, their suspicion of the sources on the science can lead them to the position that the scientific consensus is wrong. Alternatively, they can accept the science and then reject elite proposals for dealing with the problem and propose alternative policy suggestions in light of their own values and priorities, which is what I believe Monbiot has done, and Baer/Athanasiou before him. Recent essays by leftists Alexander Cockburn, Denis Rancourt, and David Noble, in contrast, take the first position. They are reacting to a recent change in elite strategy on the problem of global warming. The initial elite strategy was that of complete denial, and it was successful in delaying any action on climate change for crucial years. The recent change of strategy by part of the elite (prompted perhaps by increasing evidence in every field that global warming is happening) seems to be to try to co-opt and control the discussion, if not of the problem itself, then of the possible solutions for it. These three activists (Cockburn, Rancourt, & Noble, or CRN) have reasonable suspicions of this rapid change of elite strategy and its expression in media hype about climate change. Their reactions, however, are in error. If their views are adopted by many leftists, elites will be able to claim that leftists are anti-science and anti-green, when what people most need are sensible green proposals that are also in accord with values of justice, equality, and solidarity. In an essay on Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn makes a number of claims about climate science that indicate a dismissal of the scientific consensus. He claims there is "zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend," for example. But the mechanism by which atmospheric CO2 causes warming ("the greenhouse effect") is well understood. So is the fact that anthropogenic production of CO2 is increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. And so, too, is the current warming trend, which Cockburn acknowledges. Cockburn seeks to break the chain of reasoning (from CO2 causing warming, to anthropogenic increases of CO2 in the atmosphere contributing to warming) by suggesting that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 do not change atmospheric CO2 levels. He does so by referring to some data on CO2 emissions and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere from the 1920s and 1930s that say when anthropogenic emissions were low due to the Great Depression CO2 in the atmosphere did not change. He interprets this to mean that "it is impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from human burning of fossil fuels." But it is the very fact that CO2 is long-lived in the atmosphere (compared to water vapour, for example) that makes emissions of it such a serious problem. Even if the data he presents are accurate (the most reliable records of atmospheric CO2 begin in the 1960s) they cannot be taken to mean what he says they do. They could, instead, simply mean that there is a lag between changes in CO2 emission and changes in atmospheric concentration. One analogy a reader of the article at realclimate.org suggested was this: if you are filling a bathtub and turn off the tap, the bathtub does not instantly empty, nor does the fact that it doesn't empty make it impossible to assert a connection between the tap and the amount of water in the tub. Cockburn was also answered in more general terms by Monbiot, who cautioned against dismissing an entire body of science with a series of fairly random assertions. Some of Cockburn's specific scientific claims were answered by climate scientists at realclimate.org. Cockburn was using his scientific claims as part of a larger argument that the market in CO2 emissions was like the market in papal indulgences during medieval times - a release for people's consciences that made profits for elites (the church in medieval times, corporations today) while exploiting people's guilt (for sin then or emissions now) without fundamentally changing anything. This valid point about carbon markets is thus combined with a dismissal of climate science and global warming as a serious problem using a number of false and discredited claims as evidence. This is too bad, because it will make readers doubt his other insights, and it abets the climate deniers. Denis Rancourt, a physics professor and activist at the University of Ottawa, published a similar essay on his blog some weeks ago. In it, he sets out some of the standard scientific claims presented by denial industry spokespeople. These include notions that water vapor and solar radiation are the real culprit, not CO2 emissions, that warming is not such a big deal, and other arguments. Realclimate.org explain how water vapor is a greenhouse gas, and an important one, but it is much more short-lived in the atmosphere than CO2, and this makes it a "feedback", not a "forcing" like CO2 is. Realclimate.org also explains solar forcing: There are fluctuations in solar radiation, but they are not sufficient to explain the warming trend, nor would even the presence of significant solar radiation fluctuations make CO2 irrelevant. They also explain the lag between CO2 and temperature in the glacial record. Another useful resource to accompany Rancourt's essay is this collection of Q/A on "How to talk to a climate skeptic", by Coby Beck. Rancourt's essay ends with a long list of "selected supporting references", but there are no citations for his individual claims, and therefore no way of knowing what references he has selected or whether it actually supports what he is saying. In between making his own scientific claims, which we are supposed to accept on his authority as a physicist, he argues that scientists are not to be believed and the scientific consensus is not to be trusted because "scientists are simple beings" who follow the herd. There is a contradiction here, between Rancourt making scientific claims in his blog, which we are supposed to accept because he is a scientist, and his attacking all scientists and all of science as conformist and conservative, which we are to accept on his authority, perhaps because of his inside knowledge of scientists. I disagree with Rancourt on this entire issue of science. While science can be manipulated and a few scientists can always be found to provide the right statement for the right price (whether on climate, tobacco, or pharmaceuticals) I believe there are some things that can be known about the natural world, and scientists have uncovered some of these things, including about the climate system. How this knowledge is spun or used or ignored is another matter. But the appeal of science is that, given time and effort, we can understand things about the world. While this is no reason to completely defer to scientists, it is reason to give weight to arguments that are supported by the cumulative efforts of thousands of people who have spent time and care looking into an issue - more weight, in any case, than arguments recycled from the petroleum-funded denial industry. In contrast, Rancourt's anti-science arguments suggest that there is no way to get at an objective understanding of the climate or, by extension, any other situation. Rancourt leaves readers to accept only his authority. The political or policy core of Rancourt's essay is, again, an attack on CO2 markets. He advocates various leftist policies, and argues that leftists should advocate these without reference to CO2 emissions or global warming, which is, to him, a dangerous diversion. By combining discredited scientific claims about global warming, an attack on science itself, and leftist positions on numerous issues, Rancourt has associated decent left positions with discredited and false claims and arguments. David Noble, a friend of Rancourt's, a professor at York University and an activist, was, according to Rancourt's blog, inspired by Rancourt to write about the "global climate coup" for Canadian Dimension. Noble's argument is that global warming politics have derailed the global justice movement and diverted it into the dead end of CO2 markets. He shows how elite think-tanks and corporations have endorsed "solutions" to global warming that will increase their profits and power. His research on the corporate connections of various groups, first of the denialist persuasion, and then of the market-solutions persuasion, is useful. But he loses most of his credibility in his introduction, which implies that global warming is a funny joke: "Don't breathe. There's a total war on against CO2 emissions, and you are releasing CO2 with every breath. The multi-media campaign against global warming now saturating our senses, which insists that an increasing CO2 component of greenhouse gases is the enemy, takes no prisoners: you are either with us or you are with the"deniers." No one can question the new orthodoxy or dare risk the sin of emission." His credibility is further harmed by his conclusion, in which he calls Monbiot a dupe of the elite group that is creating hype about global warming, whose message Monbiot "unwittingly peddles with such passion." Noble calls Monbiot's book "embarrassing in its funneled focus and its naive deference to the authority of science... as if there was such a thing as science that was not also politics." Unlike Cockburn and Rancourt, Noble does not get into dubious scientific claims, but he does present global warming as if it is a diversionary elite campaign, or simply a joke, and not a serious problem. He could have made his case that elites are trying to divert attention from actual solutions to the problem (the substantive part of Monbiot's book, only the introduction of which Noble quotes) and towards creating new markets and new privileges and powers for themselves without so flippantly dismissing concern about the climate, presenting that concern as nothing more than an elite agenda, or suggesting that all science was politicized. By doing so, he associates a useful critique of elite cooptation of climate politics with a misrepresentation of the problem, its urgency, and the potential for solutions. The strength of Monbiot's book is its presentation of a set of policies that could stabilize the climate in accord with values of justice and equity. Monbiot is as hard on phony capitalist climate schemes as Cockburn, Rancourt, or Noble (CRN) are, but he does not rest his political analysis on an attack on a body of science (as Cockburn and Rancourt do), or on an attack on science itself (as Rancourt and Noble do). The problem with these authors' mixing sensible policy proposals and cautions with false scientific claims and an anti-science tone is analogous to the problem of Gore's mixing of sensible science with elite agendas. If suspicion of Gore and elite CO2 market advocacy can drive leftists like CRN towards a position denying that global warming is a problem, then a reliance on discredited science or anti-science positions by leftists like CRN can drive people away from leftists (and leftists certainly don't need more ways of driving people away). The need is for leftists to understand and explain the science of global warming and to think of and advocate proposals for solving the problem in accord with values of equality and solidarity. Both Monbiot and Baer/Athanasiou have done some of that work. Instead CRN reject the science and dismiss the solutions like Kyoto or CO2 markets not because they are inadequate (which they are) or because they serve elite agendas (which they do), but because they conclude that there is no problem to solve in the first place. CRN are trying to open the wrong debate. Rather than a debate over the validity of discredited scientific positions, what is needed is a debate on how to resist the elite agendas that have led to the warming, then to its denial, and that now seek to co-opt movements for change. On this, I hope CRN might eventually agree. Justin Podur is a writer and editor for ZNet. He can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---- "Snatched from the Jaws of Victory: Feminism Then and Now" by Paula Rothenberg It was the summer of 2002 and I was traveling through a medium-sized town in Hungary when I looked up and saw a young woman coming toward me. Fifteen or sixteen years old, she wore a shirt that proudly proclaimed her to be a "Dirty Girl." Six months later, in Philadelphia, I found myself speaking at a women's studies conference to an audience which included several young women wearing shirts with "Cunt" or "Bitch" written on their chest in an angry scrawl. Shortly after, I found myself in Panama watching a rotund 7 year old prance around in a hot pink tank top that shouted "Bling,.Bling." When I checked the web upon returning home, I discovered that "Dirty Girl" had been updated to "Stupid Dirty Girl" while another T shirt insisted "As long as I can be on top." Are the young women wearing such T-shirts liberated women who have taken control of their own bodies and now reap the benefits of the women's movement - or are they simply dupes? These experiences, and countless others like them, raise a broader question for me. They make me ask how the insights and goals of the Women's Movement have been transformed and translated as they have been integrated into popular culture and daily life? The Women's Liberation Movement that began in the 60s was originally a radical movement seeking deep and fundamental change. It identified the ways in which male and other forms of privilege had been woven into every social, political, economic institution and cultural practice in our society and went on to challenge white supremacy, heterosexist privilege, class divisions as well as the images of gender that had been normalized and in this way rendered invisible The Women's Liberation Movement I remember argued for the need for a radical transformation of all our institutions. It urged women to rethink every aspect of our lives, always asking us to reflect on whose interests were served by the ways in which society was organized and by the values we had been taught to embrace. Central to this project was the distinction between sex and gender. In order to challenge the conservative view that women's social role was determined by her nature, many feminists argued that while one is born either a man or a woman and that is a function of biology (and yes, many of us mistakenly thought that there were only two possibilities at that time), gender roles were determined by society. Women began to notice that how we were taught to define ourselves, what it meant to be a real woman, served the interests of men and capitalism. This made us suspicious of what we had been taught were our "natural" tendencies or inclinations and made us wonder about our so-called "free" choice. A very important article of the period, a true classic, was entitled "Homogenizing the American Woman: The Power of an Unconscious Ideology" written by Sandra Bem and Daryll Bem. The authors pointed out that even if discrimination were to end tomorrow, nothing very drastic would change, because discrimination is only part of the problem. "Discrimination frustrates choices already made. Something more pernicious perverts the motivation to choose. That something is an unconscious ideology about the nature of the female sex...."... In other words, many of us began to realize that we had been socialized to want things that would replicate and reinforce the status quo. The Women's Liberation Movement of the Second Wave rejected prevailing standards of beauty, the Barbie doll image, (being thin and blonde), that were virtually unattainable by anyone who wasn't white and by most of us who were white as well. The critique took the form of recognizing and challenging the ways prevailing standards of beauty and rules of dress and decorum both reflected and reinforced the existing race, class and gender hierarchy in society. Women of the Second Wave were tired of being turned into sex objects by the fashion industry and so they threw out their high heels (which were understood to be on a continuum with Chinese foot binding practices -- a way of circumscribing women's movement and keeping them dependent), took off their girdles and their bras, stopped trying to be a size 2, and focused on healthy eating - healthy for them and the planet. If we look at popular culture today - what do we see? Well, Barbie is back with a vengeance. Little girls start dieting in fourth grade and never stop. This used to be more of a problem among white girls but it has spread to all ethnic groups. And dieting isn't the half of it, anorexia and bulimia are occurring in alarming proportions. Today many young women want to dress like, Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Mariah Carey, and L'il Kim. And it is not just women in their teens and older who are dressing this way, we have four year olds and six year olds dressed as sex objects. Cleavage is everywhere and we women can't get enough of it so we go out and buy more. Some of us stopped buying bras in the 70's; today women are busy buying bras and breasts to put in them. The number of magazine stories about girls in their early and mid-teens who want breast augmentation surgery is increasing as are the number of teens who receive breast and nose jobs as birthday or high school graduation gifts. Dumb blondes are back in style: Jessica Simpson, Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton. Women hack off their toes to fit into high priced, designer shoes. We are a generation awash in plastic surgery and Botox. But the world is still a dangerous place and bad things happen to women and girls. In a world that is not safe for us, why would you dress your child to look like a sex object? Why would you dress yourself to look like a porn star? In a world where violence against women is rampant, why would you wear a t-shirt that says "Discipline Me." It's easy to imagine the rejoinder from the women at that women studies conference in Philadelphia: shouldn't women be able to dress they way they want? The answer seems unambiguous. Of course they should. But first we need to create a world in which women are genuinely free to choose. Yes, retort those same young women, but isn't wearing such a t-shirt a way of asserting one's right to self-define and challenging the system? To this I answer that it can be, but the fashion choices that many women make today do not represent a challenge to patriarchy, let alone capitalism, instead, these "choices" reflect a total submission to those systems. We have come full circle. Girls and women now believe that they show how liberated they are by dressing like the ultimate male sex fantasy. Men used to have to go to adult sex shops to see women and girls dressed the way some of us dress to go to school and work every day. In fact, women have been sold a bill of goods. We were told that the Women's Movement was about the right to choose. Corporate capitalism and patriarchy happily co-opted the slogan of the Second Wave so that any choice was defined as a liberated and empowering choice. But what did "the personal is political" really mean? I remember when it meant that what appeared to be purely personal choices made by women of their own free will (to marry, to have children, to dress and behave a certain way, to engage in certain sexual practices, the choice of whether or not to work and if we worked which career path to follow, etc) needed to be understood in the context of a system of domination where issues of race/ethnicity, class and sexuality intersected with gender to radically restrict women's opportunities and possibilities. This system had been so effective because it is virtually invisible, because the privileges at its core have been effectively rationalized and normalized in a myriad of ways through out time. During the late 60s and through out the 70s, as women shared their stories, what had been normalized, gradually, or in some cases, suddenly, stood out and demanded our attention. We found out that what appeared to be my problem, my failing, my fear, my pain was in fact shared by other women, was part of their experience too. We came to understand that "the personal is political" in an empowering sense. It wasn't just that I couldn't get certain jobs; other women had the very same problem, not because I/we weren't good enough but because of a pervasive race and gender bias within the workforce. It turned out that I was paid less than my male coworkers, not because women were inherently weaker or less competent or less productive but because jobs and pay scales were defined in ways that valued work more and described it differently, simply because it was done by a man. And whether the man wore a tie and a jacket, a sweatshirt, or a uniform. We came to understand that our dissatisfaction with aspects of our personal lives, our family structures, our most intimate relationships or our parenting responsibilities, did not necessarily grow from some deep, personal inadequacy or some psychological deficiency of our own but was rooted in the way that society was organized and the way gender (race, class, and sexuality) had been constructed. To say then that "the personal is political" was to point out that you could start with individual women's lives and move straight from their realties to institutionalized privilege and hierarchy. We began to understand that what looked like individual choices were really social in nature and reflected the values and interests of those in power. As a result, we came to be highly suspicious of our choices. Today the personal is simply personal. And that understanding has been incorporated into popular culture in the absence of any political context or analysis, Katha Pollitt puts it this way: "Women have learned to describe everything they do, no matter how apparently conformist, submissive, self-destructive or humiliating, as a personal choice that cannot be criticized because personal choice is what feminism is all about." When feminism in the 60s and 70s demanded the right to choose for women, it was in the context of recognizing the coercive force of institutionalized racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class privilege. Women had begun to understand that what appeared to be individual issues turned out to be social problems, social problems for which there were few if any individual solutions. Women looked at the things that limited and coerced our choices and asked how we could change them, not just for ourselves, but for all women, all people. Today there are no social problems. Thanks to the efforts of recent Republican administrations in Washington and the efforts of the conservative right in general, we live in a world where there is no longer a social dimension and there are no social problems. There are now only individual human beings who are worthy or unworthy, deserving or undeserving. The complex web of interlocking factors that once required serious and respectful attention to every aspect of social and economic life has been replaced by a simplistic and reductionist worldview. Social problems require broad solutions - changes in the way we do business. Individual problems get individual solutions. Postpartum depression, very much in the news a few years back after Brooke Shield gave birth to her first baby, was a problem to be solved exclusively through medication rather than by looking at the social context in which the illness occurs. In the old days, we would have at least considered the possibility that women's depression after childbirth had something to do with the social conditions of parenting and the organization of the family and that it might be improved by re-thinking gender roles and childcare options. If a man becomes a father and doesn't want to spend time with his child, do we label him ill and prescribe anti-depressants? Recently a doctor appearing on a morning television program discussed research findings that showed more adult women are being diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. He described their problem as something like "woman rushing from task to task, unable to concentrate or complete them." The solution was to get them on medication. But the medical condition he described sounds to me very much like the daily life of the average super mom in today's high power society. Perhaps re-thinking social roles and responsibilities rather than diagnosing a new medical condition might be the answer. In the summer of 2002, Clara Harris was found guilty of manslaughter after she ran over her husband who had been having an affair with his receptionist. By her own account, when she first discovered his infidelity, she immediately hired a personal trainer, dyed her hair blonde, started working out, and made an appointment with a plastic surgeon. At the height of the Women's Movement, she might have placed her individual situation within a broad social context and might have sought the support and council of a women's consciousness raising group rather than collagen injections and liposuction. Once upon a time women facing high rates of unemployment, unequal pay, non-existent or inadequate benefits, lack of affordable (or often any) childcare, and a welfare system that channels them into dead end jobs and denies them funding for education, would have organized around issues of poverty and discrimination. Now instead of challenging racism and classism, highly touted solutions to these problem suggest that women should create charities to collect used business attire for these unfortunate job seekers. If only they dressed better! But according to 2004 figures, 12.7% of the population live in poverty - approximately 1 out of every 8 people. And poverty is a social problem. It should be obvious that women living in poverty are not poor because they lack the correct fashion sense. A major victory of conservatives in this country has been to severely limit class action lawsuits. During the 1970s and 1980s, class action suits racked up one victory after another for women and men who had been discriminated against because of their race or their gender or both. Such law suits were the ultimate reflection of "the personal is political" because they grew out of an awareness that meanings were social and that patterns of behavior could establish intent. Today it is necessary to demonstrate that an individual was specifically discriminated against. This change in policy effectively denies the existence of racism, sexism, heterosexism and homophobia. By refusing to recognize patterns of behavior that establish on-going discrimination, current practice denies history. Once upon a time the personal really was political. Today, it is simply personal. Capitalist patriarchy has once again showed its extraordinary ability to take radical movements and demands that challenge the system, and re-package them in ways that actually reinforce that system and preserve the existing distribution of power and privilege in society. How convenient for capitalist patriarchy that young women today think that dressing like every man's sex fantasy is a sign of their liberation and that the women's movement was all about getting the right to choose and had nothing to do with making hard decisions about what values and what social vision should be reflected in our choices. I remember well the sexual revolution of the 1960s. It seemed, briefly, to hold out the hope that women might finally control their bodies, control their own sexuality But it soon became clear that the new sexual freedom simply meant more opportunity for men, not a new kind of experience for women, and that line comes from a 1972 article by Linda Phelps which first appeared in Women: A Journal of Liberation thirty-four years ago. In that article, Phelps wrote: "Our cultural vision is the projection of solely male experience." Has that changed? She went on to say "Women are bombarded with the same sex stimuli of the female body as is a man - hence females often respond in a narcissistic way to their own body and what is being done to it. The female is taught to be the object of sexual desires." Sounds painfully familiar. "Women are socialized to relate to a false world of erotic fantasies and images that are defined and controlled by men..." In fact, women are beginning to realize that nothing new happened at all. "What we have is simply a new, more sophisticated (and thus more insidious) version of male sexual culture. Sexual freedom has meant more opportunity for men, nor a new kind of experience for women. And it has been precisely our own experience as women which as been decisive in developing the Women's Liberation critique of the sexual revolution." If you go to the Human Rights Watch website (hrw.org) you will read the following: Millions of women throughout the world live in conditions of abject deprivation of, and attacks against, their fundamental human rights for no other reason than that they are women. Abuses against women are relentless, systematic, and widely tolerated, if not explicitly condoned. Violence and discrimination against women are global social epidemics. We live in a world in which women do not have basic control over what happens to their bodies. In such a world, going through the mime of empowerment defined by a masculine culture in the name of feminism is all the more disempowering and degrading. Empowerment, we are now asked to believe, is not about getting an education, not about becoming economically independent, not about taking control of our bodies, not about saving the environment, not about working toward social justice, but dressing a certain way and wearing the newest version of what ever t-shirt or body piecing we choose. And whose interests does this serve? Today cultural practices continue to occur within the context of unequal power relations. Racism, sexism, and class privilege are still alive and well. They frame our choices and define the meaning of what we choose. The women's movement of the Second Wave talked, not about "equality," but about liberation, because believe me, equality is not enough. We have gone from seeking to challenge and change the ways in which institutionalized privilege and hierarchy limit and coerce our choices to the illusion that the battle for women's rights and civil rights is over and done. We have been duped into trading social critique and collective action for a vision of feminism that offers us personal choice without social responsibility and without social context. We have exchanged the possibility of genuine change for feminism light and designer water. And in the end, we know whose interest that serves. Paula Rothenberg is Senior Fellow at The Murphy Institute, CUNY. From 1989 to 2006 she served as director of The New Jersey Project on Inclusive Scholarship, Curriculum, and Teaching and professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at The William Paterson University of New Jersey. She is the author of Invisible Privilege: A Memoir About Race, Class and Gender; her diversity text Race, Class and Gender in the United States is in its seventh edition; a third edition of her anthology White Privilege: Readings on the Other Side of Racism will be published in late summer 2007; and her newest college text anthology, Beyond Borders: Thinking Critically about Global Issues, was published by Worth in July 2005. She can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED]