In addition to packing a hefty antioxidant punch, the mango – a superfruit if there ever was one – is now proven to fend off poverty, global warming, and sexism.

According to an article in the BBC News, residents of the Dharhara village in the Bhagalpur district of northwestern India have engaged in a social experiment using mangoes to up the value of their daughters. In many parts of India, girls are seen as less desirable than boys. Families want a male heir, and a son is seen as an extra source of income for the family.  Female feticide – in which doctors illegally abort unborn baby girls on the basis of their sex alone – is rampant throughout India, with 50 million girls missing, according to UNICEF. Female feticide has created a shortage of eligible brides in India, with males in some urban regions traveling to rural areas to secure a wife. But girls who aren’t aborted are often subject to extreme domestic violence later in life. Bride burning, in which men set fire to their wives for lack of a sufficient dowry, occurs in parts of India.

It is against this grisly backdrop that the residents of Dharhara have decided to make their daughters more valuable in Indian society. For every girl born, the family plants at least 10 mango trees in the village. The mangoes provide a source of income for the parents, allowing them to save enough money for a dowry upon their daughter’s marriage – thus avoiding the violence that accompanies a scanty marriage settlement. One mango orchard yields about $4,245 worth of mangoes each season, enough to supplement the familial income, with leftover money going in a bank account for the child’s dowry.

“We heard about it from our fathers and they from their fathers. It has been in the family and the village from ages,” Subhendu Kumar Singh, a school teacher, told the BBC. “This is our way of meeting the challenges of dowry, global warming and female foeticide. There has not been a single incident yet of female foeticide or dowry death in our village.”

While the Dharhara tradition shelters the village’s girls from the misogyny in greater India, the fact that mango trees alone can make a girl more valuable speaks volumes of the undervaluing of women in the first place. Preferable, of course, is a major cultural shift, one in which women – mango trees or not – are treasured from birth like men. But barring that, the Dharhara mango project is a model worth emulating.

Image: Mickey_boy[L]

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It’s the end of June already, and the earth’s half-spin around the sun has brought us ladies plenty to wring our delicate little hands about. From Iranian clerics blaming earthquakes on our breasts to oil spills wreaking havoc on our pregnancies, 2010 has made us reach for the smelling salts on numerous occasions. Here at EcoSalon, we’ve covered women and the environment with vim, bringing you celebratory communiques alongside melancholic missives. Below, you’ll find a roundup of the news in 2010 thus far. If the past six months are any indication, the rest of the year will be a doozy. Feeling faint yet?

• Is GINK the new DINK? It used to be that childfree couples were called DINKs – Double Income, No Kids. But the great American greenwash has influenced reproductive choices as well, with an increasing number of couples citing the environment as a reason to go kidless. A recent study by Oregon State University added fuel to the fire, revealing that not having kids is 20 times more environmentally friendly than any other day to day green task, like recycling. Lisa Hymas of Grist coined the term GINK – Green Inclinations, No Kids – to describe childfree tree huggers like herself.

• Condoms came under attack earlier this year, with women’s health writers and scientists bemoaning the prophylactic’s sorry environmental record of sullying our beaches and clogging up our landfills. While greensters wondered whether condoms are biodegradable (likely not – their decomposable latex is mixed with human-made chemicals), we asked another question: why have this conversation in the first place? Condoms, as a blogger at EcoGeek noted, are “the single most important environmental innovation” ever, curbing environmentally-catastrophic population growth.

• Congress attacked killer chemicals this spring when members of the House and Senate introduced versions of the Safe Chemicals Act, a bill meant to fortify a toothless, decades-old law against allowing dangerous chemicals in household products (we all know how well that one worked…hello bisphenol-a). Uteruses in America rejoiced at the news: the Safe Chemicals Act is a boon to women, whose reproductive systems have been under siege by infertility-causing chemicals in water bottles and other plastics.

• In April, an Iranian cleric asserted that women who don’t cover up cause earthquakes. His declaration–meant to dissuade Iranian women from unveiling–ignited a response in the U.S., when blogger Jennifer McCreight organized a Boobquake, a day in which women wore low-cut tops without tectonic incident to prove the cleric wrong. But what could have been a bold political stunt turned into a ho-hum protest, with men egging on their breast-baring peers while feminists complained that the plight of Iranian women became fodder for a Girls Gone Wild spectacle.

• As if the earthquake itself didn’t cause enough damage, sexual violence rates spiked in Haiti in the months after the disaster. According to an article in Women’s eNews, aid workers in a major Port-au-Prince refugee camp fielded daily reports of rape, prompting the United Nations to send a special unit of 130 female Bangladeshi soldiers to address the violence. Lamentably, the post-disaster rape crisis was not unique to Haiti alone; many Hurricane Katrina survivors were similarly re-victimized.

• On the 50th anniversary of the birth control pill, we noted that the pill’s invention by women’s rights crusader Margaret Sanger initiated the era of modern family planning, allowing women to choose the number and spacing of their children – a boon for their health and the health of their babies alike. But while the pill has done its part to keep our skyrocketing population in check (if you think things are bad, just imagine the world without it) its environmental record isn’t spotless – the hormones in the pill, excreted into waste water through urine, cause fatal mutations in fish populations.

• When a Houston tanning salon called upon the spirit of Coco Chanel to promote its new earth-friendly false tanning beet spray, we called foul. As legend has it, Chanel sparked the tanning craze in America when she stepped off a boat in Cannes with perfectly bronzed skin. Though Coco was a pioneering designer, breaching the boundary between menswear and womenswear, the tanning trendsetter didn’t galvanize women to leave the drudgery of housework in order to bask in the sunshine. Rather, Coco inadvertently created another unrealistic beauty standard.

• While much of the initial news surrounding the BP oil spill focused on the disaster’s effect on wildlife, we asked about its impact on human livelihoods. Coastal Women for Change, a community organization that sprung out of the post-Katrina haze to bring attention to the need for improved childcare in Biloxi, Mississippi, has stepped up after the spill by serving as a conduit for information from the Environmental Protection Agency to the local fishers. The biggest challenge? Getting fishers of different ethnic and economic backgrounds to rally together for their interests.

• Last year, journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn published their book Half the Sky, a groundbreaking tome arguing that international aid is more effective when directed toward women. While Kristof and WuDunn described women as the gatekeepers of health and well-being in their communities, they left out one green detail: the fact that women also hold the keys to conservation. In Indonesia, the Environmental Ministry has begun offering classes on water conservation to women in rural areas who are responsible for fetching and distributing water to their families.

• Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, but we all care equally about the earth, right? Wrong. According to several articles this year, men and women display their green pride differently, with men working for big picture sustainability while women, ever the quibblers, take on recycling and composting projects. We pointed out the ludicrousy in this theory, noting that a handful of anecdotes don’t constitute a trend. With all this talk about men, women, and their green differences, we lose sight of the why we should go green at all.

• As if the oil spill wasn’t dangerous enough, the chemical dispersants used to clean it up could spell health risks for pregnant mothers and their unborn children. According to information recently released by the Environmental Protection Agency, chemicals that caused health problems in the cleanup workers on the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill are being used again today. Pregnant women have been advised to stay as far away from the contaminants as possible – a tall order for those women who actually live in the Gulf.

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According to Lucinda Marshall at Truthout, young children and babies in utero are at a major risk of chemical poisoning after oil spills because their immune systems are not fully developed, leaving them incapacitated to fight off dangerous compounds. While the National Institutes of Health have provided information on the way endocrine disrupters – common in both the oil and the substances used to clean it up – scientists aren’t clear on the effects of the chemicals, in part because until very recently, they had no idea which chemicals were being disseminated.

Now, without first telling Nalco Holding Co., the manufacturer of the dispersants that BP is using, the Environmental Protection Agency has released a list of ingredients used to break down the oil. And – shocker – the news isn’t pretty. One of the ingredients, 2-butoxyethanol, caused major health problems among cleanup workers on the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. That, plus the oil itself, could spell major risks to pregnant women and their fetuses.

According to Dr. Gina Solomon, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, “Some of the volatile chemicals in oil have been linked to miscarriage, preterm birth, and low birth weight, so it is a good idea for pregnant women to avoid the areas where there are elevated levels of VOCs [Volatile Organic Compounds] in the air. These are areas that include noticeable smells of oil or visible oil and also any areas where the EPA monitoring system detects elevated levels. The EPA air monitoring results are being updated regularly at www.epa.gov/bpspill. To be cautious, pregnant women may choose to avoid any areas directly along the waterfront and beachfront, even when oil is not visible.”

That’s easy enough advice to follow for would-be Gulf Coast vacationers (as if there are any this season). But for pregnant women living near the spill zone – where oil and dispersants reenter the atmosphere after being burned off the water – avoiding chemical exposure is akin to turning a blind eye to the disaster itself.

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If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, than who takes better care of planet Earth? This squabble of the sexes has surfaced on the internet in recent months, with commentators pointing to the fairer sex as the keeper of the environment. But do gendered discussions about the environment miss the forest for the trees?

In an article this week on The Huffington Post, Jennifer Grayson, founding editor of The Red, White, and Green, discusses the notion that women must be greener than men because men have been responsible for two recent environmental catastrophes: the BP oil spill and the Massey coal mine explosion in West Virginia.

“…I don’t believe that either of these examples proves that men are somehow less likely environmentalists than women,” Grayson writes. “In my mind, they only demonstrate two inconvenient truths: 1) Women are still poorly represented in leadership roles in large corporations (to wit: 29 female CEOs in the Fortune 1000); and 2) A lot of large corporations are too greedy to put environmental concerns before their bottom line.

While Grayson checks off male and female contributions to the environment (like Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring), she concedes that men and women might handle their environmental concerns differently, with men focusing on big picture eco concerns and women taking small steps to green their lives.

“I’ve witnessed this in my own life: My mother-in-law, to her credit, willingly jumps on almost any eco-improvement I’ve written about, especially when it comes to household purchasing. No change is too small – organic milk, BPA-free cans, biodegradable doggie doo bags – you name it,” Grayson writes. “My father-in-law, on the other hand, isn’t as excited by recycled wine totes (although I’m sure he uses them), but he does boast a fabulous career in the green energy sector.”

A January article in the New York Times hammers the point home: women want to green their lives, while men want to green the world. Marital strife ensues.

“Christienne deTournay Birkhahn, executive director of the EcoMom Alliance, an organization based in Marin County that provides education to women who want to have their families live more sustainably, finds that disputes over how green is green enough often divide along predictable lines by sex,” reads the article, “Women often see men as not paying sufficient attention to the home. Men, for their part, really want to make a large impact and aren’t interested in a small impact,” she says.

This eco discord plays out in predictable ways – woman wants to save water, man likes to take long showers, woman complains, man refers to her environmental awakening as a “high-priestess phase.” Or, woman wants to recycle yogurt cups, man tosses them in the trash to “bait” her, woman complains, man tells her that her efforts won’t make a difference for the environment.

While believable, these tiffs should be taken for what they are – ho-hum marital disputes – rather than indications of broader interactions between men and women regarding their relationships to the environment. The notion that women zero in on small ways to change the environment fits nicely into the “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” theory that women keep track of their relationships through an elaborate subconscious point system, one in which emotional bonds are strengthened by a series of tiny gestures from their male mates: flowers, compliments, chivalry. Women, it follows, are quibbling, nitpicky nesters, ladies who want things just so in their relationships and homes. Greening the home? Just another way for women to get their control freak on.

In this template, men are the big-picture thinkers, cultivating closeness with their partners through lavish love displays: trips to the Bahamas, diamond rings. They express their concern for the environment in parallel strokes: Recycling? How about engineering a new recycling system?! Men are the visionaries, the ones who cultivate renewable energy sources while their wives tend to the backyard chickens. 

While these stereotypes about men and women boil down complex interactions into a set of simple gender rules – creating expectations for men and women that dog them throughout their relationships and careers – they also do a disservice to the environment. With all this hype about who cares about what, we forget why we should care at all.

Image: Ed Yourdon

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Help women and you help the world. It’s a philosophy gaining traction among international development gurus who say women in the global south are the best providers for their families and communities. According to a New York Times Magazine article by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn published last August, women in the developing world are often more responsible than men when it comes to managing money in the home, making them prime beneficiaries for microfinance loans.

“In general, aid appears to work best when it is focused on health, education and microfinance (although microfinance has been somewhat less successful in Africa than in Asia),” write Kristof and WuDunn. “And in each case, crucially, aid has often been most effective when aimed at women and girls; when policy wonks do the math, they often find that these investments have a net economic return. Only a small proportion of aid specifically targets women or girls, but increasingly donors are recognizing that that is where they often get the most bang for the buck.”

In their book Half the Sky, named for a Chinese saying that “Women hold up half the sky,” Kristof and WuDunn argue for an increased focus on women and girls when it comes to international aid, maintaining that countries with pitiful track records on women’s rights are also the countries most mired in poverty and extremism. Fix the former and you fix the latter, they say.

Kristof and WuDunn provide a compelling argument. But their philosophy should go one further: in addition to reducing poverty, helping women also helps the environment. According to a recent article in The Jakarta Post, the Indonesian Environmental Ministry has begun offering classes to women in Yogyakarta and Central Java about water conservation. Since women provide food for their families, they’re also the ones who acquire water each day. “In almost every village, it is a woman’s responsibility to provide water, whether as a mother or daughter,” says Linda Amalia Sari Gumelar, the Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection Minister. Public works agencies that build water projects ignore the needs of women at their own peril. “Planners should be aware of the different conditions: women on foot and men on motorcycles. In housework, water is closely-related to domestic work. Distances between water sources and settlements should be calculated carefully.”

Since women transport water, and then use it to cook and clean for their families, they make natural gatekeepers for water sources, the first-line-of-defense conservationists who can teach their peers how to make their daily water portion go further. Though the true impact of the Environmental Ministry water protection classes in Indonesia has yet to be realized, focusing on the environment by focusing on women is smart policy. Women hold up half the sky – it’s true. And if we let them, it’ll be a cleaner sky at that.

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When Hurricane Katrina clobbered the Gulf Coast in 2005, women bore the brunt of the chaos that ensued, facing sexual violence and abuse at the hands of relatives and strangers. It was out of that devastating period that Coastal Women for Change was formed, an organization devoted to bringing women’s voices to reconstruction efforts.

Founded in 2006 by a hairdresser and community activist named Sharon Hanshaw, CWC organized community forums, drawing attention to the need for childcare facilities in east and west Biloxi, and calling for an increased police presence in certain areas to protect the elderly living alone in trailers. “We believe there is value in coming together as a community, because some issues can seem insurmountable when considered alone, but when you get together with others, there is strength in those numbers,” reads the CWC web site’s About Us section.

Now, in the wake of the British Petroleum oil spill, CWC is contending with a new challenge: how to bring disaster relief to people who are already scarred by disaster. In an interview with American Prospect, Sharon Hanshaw describes the impact that the spill has had on the Gulf region’s collective psyche. “I can’t describe it. It’s like a death sentence or something,” she says. “When we think of any type of devastation, we think of Katrina automatically because people still live in the cottages. Others don’t fully understand what people who live in it feel; they think people should be over that. But if you don’t have a house, and you’re still paying for a mortgage, but it’s only a slab there…that gives you a sense of hopelessness.”

As the spill creeps closer to the coastline, Hanshaw’s biggest fear is that it will decimate the Gulf’s commercial fishing industry, leaving the 13,000 people employed by fisheries and restaurants out of work. “If it comes, you won’t have any jobs,” she says. “You would have to think about, what could we do besides clean up? What else can people do? They really want to know what their career is. They want work for a paycheck. If you can’t fish now, it’s like, OK, let’s clear the debris.”

But organizing the fishing community to prepare for a potential disaster isn’t as simple as it sounds. “A majority of fishermen are Vietnamese, but there are black and white fishermen. But they’re having their own meetings, and it’s like, ‘Oh, here we go.’ It’s redundant to be separate, and you got the same plight here. I see it all the time,” says Hanshaw. “All these different constituents are having meetings. They’re having meetings separately, and I’m like, do you know that you all have the same plight? But that’s our problem. We don’t know how to think that way.”

For now, CWC is acting as an information line from the Environmental Protection Agency and British Petroleum to local fisheries, keeping Gulf Coast fishers apprised of changes during the oil spill. “We’re just trying to not put fear in people. We’re trying to stay positive and hopeful, but we still know that we should be active in this.”

Image: Jay Fox Photos

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A Houston salon is home to the next big eco beauty trend: fake tanning using beet-based dyes. According to a recent story in CultureMap, a Houston entertainment site, a “body hueing” salon called Throwing Copper has developed a spray-on solution from the deep red root. The so-called “green tanning” trend is a boon for those who want a sunless tan without the harsh chemicals. But Throwing Copper has also managed to conflate bronzed skin with women’s lib, a claim that’s as artificial as it gets.

According to the CultureMap story, Throwing Copper owners Samantha Buchanan Curry and Stephani Adams were inspired to join the tanning trade by Coco Chanel, the frontierswoman of modern female couture. As the story goes, Coco Chanel ushered in the bronzed era in 1923 when she disembarked from a yacht in Cannes with perfectly tanned skin, rousing women to ditch their umbrellas in the summer months. While Chanel’s storied sunburn may have galvanized the tanning trend, cultural mores surrounding skin tone had been in flux for decades. Pale skin was once a characteristic of the elite, a way for privileged individuals to differentiate themselves from day laborers and farm workers who toiled under the sun. When the industrial revolution brought low wage jobs indoors, pale skin transcended socioeconomic lines. Around the same time, white aristocrats began sunning themselves while on vacation in the French Riviera. And doctors began recommending tanning as a remedy to cure tuberculosis and other illnesses.

Coco Chanel may have initiated a tanning craze when she stepped off that boat. But she did not initiate women’s liberation, as Throwing Copper’s Curry and Adams would have you believe. According to the spa’s web site, Chanel’s tan empowered women. “Chanel revolutionized fashion trends by designing women’s clothes that revealed more skin, and in the process redefined social norms by making it ‘au courant’ to acquire a sun tan. Women stepped out of the house and started enjoying outdoor life”¦”

Chanel’s menswear designs for women upended gender norms in the fashion world. But her tan? It was the promise of paid employment – not the promise of bronzed skin – that propelled women to step out of their homes. The only thing that sunbathing has brought us – aside from melanoma – is another pointless beauty standard.

But if it’s one you adhere to, best to take Curry and Adams’ advice and go green. A fake tan without the chemicals is better for your skin and the environment. It just won’t guarantee gender equity.

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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the FDA’s approval of the birth control pill. The pill was first envisioned by family planning crusader Margaret Sanger as a remedy to the debilitating cycle of perpetual pregnancy for married women. Sanger’s own mother died at the age of 50 after 18 pregnancies; at her funeral Sanger famously confronted her father, telling him, “You caused this. Mother is dead from having too many children.”

The pill was intended to proffer women control over their reproductive destinies. But its secondary impact was just as important: women entered the workforce. Before the pill, less than 20 percent of women with a child under 18 worked outside the home. By the end of the last century, that number skyrocketed to 70 percent. Though many women still find themselves choosing between a career and a family, the pill allowed women to better calibrate these decisions. What followed, of course, was a major upheaval in the way we view men and women and their societal roles. Today, we’re still adjusting to that delicious shakedown.

For all the benefits of the pill, the iconic contraceptive has reaped its fair share of criticism. Like the condom, the pill, which is taken by more than 100 million women worldwide, has come under fire for having an iffy environmental track record. In a recent post on Grist.org, Lisa Hymas rolls her eyes at the media’s love note to the pill on its 50th anniversary.

“We’re still agog over a pill that Margaret Sanger dreamed up in 1912 – one that we have to take every single day, one that messes with our hormones, one that has unpleasant side effects for many women, one that contaminates our water supplies.”

Indeed, the pill is widely credited with diminishing certain fish populations. Estrogen, excreted in the urine of pill users, enters waterways where it is consumed by fish. In one Canadian and U.S. government experiment, male winnows exposed to trace amounts of estrogen became feminized. Their testicular development stopped and they began making eggs instead. Unable to reproduce, the fish population in the experiment died out within two years.

In addition to its impact on wildlife, the pill’s estrogen runoff may adversely affect humans, particularly in developing countries where waste water is more commonly recycled for human consumption.

Hymas’ call for a greener pill, a more accessible pill, and even a pill for men, deserves to be seconded. But let’s not forget that the pill has been a major boon for the environment in one regard. If you think the earth is overpopulated now, imagine what things would look like without the contraceptive. And for that reason, we toast the pill on its 50th anniversary.

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We’re all familiar with the human and environmental tolls that immediately follow natural disasters. But there’s one aftereffect of hurricanes and earthquakes that often goes overlooked: rape. In Haiti, the aftershocks of the January 12th earthquake continue in Internally Displaced Person camps as men rape women. According to a story in Women’s eNews, aid workers in the Champ-de-Mars camp in Port-au-Prince – home to 50,000 internal refugees and pictured above – field reports of rape on a daily basis. And United Nations workers say that sexual violence has increased in recent months.

There is no concrete data on the number of rapes that have occurred since the earthquake. Haiti’s formal tracking system, created by the United Nations Development Fund for Women, was destroyed with the quake. But the uptick in rapes is a typical phenomenon in the wake of a natural disaster.

After Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, aid workers cited an increase in the number of rapes. Exact statistics, however, are difficult to come by because police officers refused to document rapes that happened outside of their jurisdictions. This meant that women raped in New Orleans and then evacuated to Houston could not report their assaults with Houston police. While aid workers scrambled to piece together a picture of post-Katrina sexual assault, one high-profile rape brought national attention to the epidemic. Charmaine Neville, daughter of musician Charles Neville of the Neville Brothers, recounted her rape on Baton Rouge television, saying that she and several other women were assaulted after they sought refuge on the roof of a school.

“I found some police officers. I told them that a lot of us women had been raped down there by guys who had come (into)… the neighborhood where we were, that were helping us to save people. But other men, and they came and they started raping women and… and they started killing them,” Neville said. “And I don’t know who these people were. I’m not going to tell you I know who they were because I don’t. But what I want people to understand is that if we had not been left down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things wouldn’t have happened.”

According to the New York City Alliance on Sexual Assault, rape following natural disasters can be explained by a number of reasons – some of them preventable. First there’s the fact that societal support mechanisms – social norms that stigmatize rape and crime, for instance – dissolve during crises. Then there’s the fact that psychological strain and deep-seated sexist attitudes lead some men to see unaccompanied women in refugee and IDP camps as public sexual property. But other causes may be more easily prevented. Refugee camps are often hastily constructed out of necessity. That means that large groups of unrelated people sleep in the same rooms, creating opportunities for sexual assault. Additionally, the lack of police officers in refugee camps means that crimes go unpunished.

In Haiti, the United Nations is addressing the rise in sexual violence by sending a unit of 130 female Bangladeshi soldiers to protect Haitian women and serve as their allies. While similar deployments have been successful in post-war Liberia, Haiti’s anti-rape workers remain skeptical that this will stem the tide of sexual assault. “What we need is security,” Marie Eramithe Delva, a co-coordinator at a Haitian grassroots female empowerment organization, told Women’s eNews. “Right now we have none and the rapes are happening not only at night, but in the daytime.”

Image: BBC World Service

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In the Book of Genesis, God punishes wicked humans by creating a flood to destroy the earth, leaving Noah to salvage biodiversity on his fabled ark. This narrative paradigm – men and women misbehave, God causes a natural disaster – may sound like the stuff of biblical legend. But ask some religious extremists and they’ll tell you that people – women in particular – are causing catastrophic events.

In 2005, a group called Columbia Christians for Life said that women caused Hurricane Katrina by having abortions, evidenced by the fact that satellite images of the storm resembled (if you squint a bit) a six-week-old fetus in utero. Earlier this year, Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson claimed that Haitians brought the devastating January earthquake upon themselves when their ancestors signed a (historically dubious) pact with the devil to liberate themselves from the French.

And now, a senior Iranian cleric named Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi says that Iranian women cause earthquakes when they wear immodest clothing. “Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes,” he said during a prayer sermon. “What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble? There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes.”

Inane and bigoted assertions like those above deserve to be reckoned with. But they shouldn’t be reckoned with with even more inanity, which is exactly what happened earlier this week when Jennifer McCreight of Blag Hag staged her much-hyped Boobquake by urging women the world over to harness the tectonic power of their ta-tas by wearing low-cut tops. With nearly 70,000 members participating, according to Boobquake’s Facebook page, the Monday event went off as planned – women bared their breasts, the earth remained still (save for a coincidental quake off the coast of Taiwan), and – as if there were any doubt – the cleric’s theory proved false.

So what’s the problem here? It’s not that McCreight and friends were wrong to confront the sexist statement. And for the record, there’s nothing suspect about women baring their souls or their bodies for a cause. The issue is that Boobquake devolved into a Girls Gone Wild-esque spectacle for the male gaze. According to Salon writer Beth Mann, who reviewed hundreds of comments on the Facebook page, “it seemed to be turning into something else, with many men chiming in, with their ‘show us your tits’ camera-ready attitude. Women on parade again… sigh.”

What’s more, Boobquake, while well-intentioned, didn’t do much to help out the cleric’s target audience – Iranian women. “By Iranian cleric standards, every day in America is boobquake.  And according to the original story, the cleric was chastising not women around the world for flashing a little boob or wearing tight jeans, but going after Iranian women who show a little hair or wear clothes that indicate that a shape might be visible underneath,” notes Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon. Instead of using this as an opportunity to learn about the lives of Iranian women, or to comment on the fact that blaming earthquakes on female immodesty is akin to blaming rape on female immodesty, Boobquake became a diversion.

Next time someone blames a natural disaster on human moral behavior, let’s think our response through a little more. And while we’re at it, how about a little information on the way that humans do contribute to natural disasters – not through moral or immoral activity but through pollution.

Image: Lawrence OP

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