By Eric Butler
A different kind of “girl talk” will take place Wednesday at the Atomic Saucer, 1000 E. Oak St. At 7:30 p.m., the coffeeshop will host a discussion meeting presented by the Feminist League of Organized Resistance, a former U of L student organization now transitioning into a community-based nonprofit group. The discussion will be led by FLOR’s co-chair president Sandra Krift and will focus on the topic of “Gender Identity.” Krift and the rest of the Feminist League invite anyone interested to come and participate.
“It’s not a speaker, it’s a discussion,” said Gina Portelli, FLOR’s other co-chair president. “Sandra [Krift] will kind of moderate, but really it’s just people generating ideas and bouncing them off each other. It’s meant to be informative but also just a sharing of thoughts.”
Since its inception in July 2003, FLOR has been working to bring women’s issues to the surface of public discourse. Through discussions, events and other grassroots education efforts, the group has tried to get people talking about and acting against the inequalities and insecurities women face in our society.
“In all of our actions we’re trying to both educate and raise awareness about women’s issues because we really feel like a lot of people have a misconstrued notion of feminism,” Portelli said.
“To me, feminism is just a simple, basic respect for women and women’s abilities to be on the same level as men.”
Evolving out of the student organization Vox: Voices for Planned Parenthood, Krift and Portelli wanted to expand their energies beyond reproductive rights issues and take a broader stance on women’s rights in general; thus FLOR was born. One year later, seeing how many of the members were no longer students, and worried that individuals in the outer community were being deterred from participating, the group decided to break away from the university and seek nonprofit status.
Nancy Theriot, professor and chairperson for U of L’s Women and Gender Studies Department, was the group’s adviser before the switch.
“The media consistently portrays feminists as crazy, shrill, unreasonably angry, ugly and man-hating,” Theriot said. “Such an image also promotes the idea that the goals of feminism (equality, social justice) are likewise crazy, unreasonable, man-hating, etc. But a feminist is a person who believes in full equality between men and women, girls and boys; who recognizes that we’re not there yet; and who attempts to work toward change.”
“Right now for us it’s all about taking small steps and doing small things, progressing,” Portelli said. “We’re working a lot on just getting our name out and the concept of who we are and seeing how people feel about that.
“We’re trying to use these discussion meetings as a way of fostering ideas, and as a kind of safe space for people to discuss these issues. Our ultimate goal is to put discussion into action but we want to start in a place where we’re not just blindly acting without knowing what kind of support we have,” she said.
FLOR got some feedback a couple weeks ago, on Jan. 28 at the Rudyard Kipling. The group brought together four all-female bands and the Grotesque Burlesque dance show to celebrate the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark court decision that declared abortion a legal right for women.
“We weren’t able to do it on the exact anniversary, so we did it the next weekend,” said Portelli. “There were a lot of different people there and different ideas going around and different ideas of feminism, too, but all still there for the pro-choice cause of it all. Everyone was really supportive and it was really good.”
The group also puts out a zine series, called “NonIssue.” The third installment was released last September and served as the “Feminist’s Guide to Louisville.” It featured, among other things, a study of Ear X-tacy’s local music section’s guy-to-girl ratio (482 men, 62 women) and an article on some pitiable female-recognized landmarks.
“We have things like the Louisville Slugger Museum and all these huge, phallic, male things, and then we have, like, a parking lot devoted to these women,” Portelli said. She’s referring to Mildred and Patty Hill, the two Louisville teachers who wrote “Happy Birthday,” one of the most popular songs ever in the English language. Their 17-space “Happy Birthday Lot” is located near Ninth and Main Street.
But women have much more to be worried about than paltry dedications. Fellow FLOR member Jessica Farquhar said, “We’ve never had a female president and the majority of our policymakers are male. That’s surely not a democracy; the majority of us (women are 51% of the population) are not represented. The same thing at U of L. 81% of tenure-track positions are held by men.”
Theriot continued to spell out some of the ways our society falls short of gender equality.
“Women in every racial, educational, regional and age category make less money than men in the same category. … Women are not allowed leadership positions in most of the world’s religions, and the male interpretation of “sacred” texts supports female inferiority. … Insurance companies pay for Viagra, but not birth-control pills; the Bush administration is halting the over-the-counter distribution of the Morning-After pill. … Date rape, marital rape, the celebration of rape and degrading sex in media. … Women and girls suffer sex-specific violence in this country and the world. … There is so much more and so many more categories,” she said.
To find out just how far it goes, Portelli recommended that everyone, including men, should take a Women’s Studies course, or at least read through the class’ textbook.
“I do worry that people don’t know,” she said. “I took an intro Women’s Studies class and was just shocked at how many people — I mean after having thought about this for so many years I never realized that some people had never even considered that being a woman might have disadvantages in our world.”
It was for this very purpose that the Feminist League was created, so that these truths might begin to reach a little further into the public consciousness. But Portelli isn’t starry-eyed about her task; she realizes that these problems run deep into the social fabric.
“Realistically, me in Louisville making a zine — or even doing anything radical — is not going to change the inner workings of the system,” she said. “It’s about teaching people and promoting people, behaving different and thinking different within what we can do. Realizing that this is what I’m living in, this is what I have to respond to, what I can change about the way I choose to live that will make me feel more empowered in my environment.
“Everyone’s realistic about the steps that need to be taken. It needs to start on a personal level first, with people wanting that to change, before it could ever be a universal kind of change.”
The Feminist League of Organized Resistance is working on their fourth installment of “NonIssue,” which will focus on radical politics. The group is accepting public submissions to the zine on that subject. They’ve also released a FLOR fundraising t-shirt displaying an anatomical figure of a vagina, which reads, “The whole is greater than the sum of my parts.”
