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Divorce Forum Meeting- NOW NYS

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Divorce Forum Meeting

Sponsored by the National Organization for Women-NYS

The next NOW divorce/custody/support forum meeting will be held tomorrow on Wednesday, February 17th, 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm. As always there is an experienced matrimonial attorney attending to answer your questions and there is exciting news about legislation passed you should all know about.    Hope to see you there.  Please RSVP Tracy at  (516) 233-9343

What the Forum is NOT: free legal representation.

What the Forum IS:  It is an opportunity to learn how to help yourself navigate the murky waters of the court systems procedures and rules, to learn what options may be available to you, and to get answers to legal questions from an experienced matrimonial attorney free of charge.

It is also an opportunity to occasionally be involved in actions like supporting legislation so desperately needed to bring women a level playing field in courts.

It is an opportunity to network with women who are facing the same challenges that you are, and other women who often have the same judge, attorney, forensic and/or law guardian as you do.

Want to be involved in an important survey that addresses this issue?

Go to our  home page www.nownys.org and download the survey, fill it out and send it to us asap.

Category: Blog, Co-Sponsored Event, Events /

Resources & Call for Submissions- National Eating Disorders Awareness Week

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by Meredith Villano

In honor of Feb. 21-27, 2010 Paradigm Shift is seeking blog, graphic art, and video submissions related to eating disorder recovery.  Please let us know how you would like to be credited (by name or anonymous)- deadline, Friday March 5th.

Email submissions to: blog@paradigmshiftnyc.com

Since the early 1980s, and especially in the last 5-10 years, much has been written about the personal experience of EDs, societal/cultural pressures to be thin, negative media images, and the cult of the emaciated celebrity, while the experience of the recovery process hardly gets mentioned- which is to the detriment of those effected.  EDs are also far more complex than the mass media would have you believe. According to the there is a biological basis for EDs, “unlike a neurological disorder, which generally can be pinpointed to a specific lesion on the brain, an eating disorder likely involves abnormal activity distributed across brain systems. With increased recognition that mental disorders are brain disorders, more researchers are using tools from both modern neuroscience and modern psychology to better understand eating disorders”.  Studies have identified links between a specific gene variation as well as other biological predispositions for EDs.  On the other hand, some think that EDs stem only from a culturally based internalization of sexism.  Most will agree that it’s a combination of biological, environmental, emotional and behavioral factors.  A metaphor that has been used while thinking about how one develops an eating disorder (and best relates to my personal insight and observations):  biological factors (such as brain chemistry/genetic pre-dispositions) are like a gun, personality traits are the bullets, and environmental factors pull the metaphorical trigger.  ED recovery is a complex process that involves more than promoting and creating healthy media images and role models, and this process deserves more attention in order to save the lives, and better the lives of those effected.

We welcome your thoughts on the recovery process and treatment, in order in give hope to others and to better understand what has worked.

Ideas for submissions focusing on recovery:

  • your experience of recovery and/or treatment- what keeps you healthy
  • your professional experience of working in the field of EDs
  • struggles with recovery, claiming the terms “in recovery” or “recovered”
  • health insurance coverage
  • how you have supported a friend, family member, partner or loved one
  • feminism and ED recovery
Submissions on ED activism and prevention also welcome.
Resources:
For treatment options call 866-690-7239

Books on Feminism and EDs from a variety of perspectives:

Category: Blog, Call for Submissions, Events /

Rewrite Your Sexual Script: 5 Creative Ways to Nurture & Ignite Your Sexuality, a FREE teleclass for women!

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There are 2 opportunities to participate in this class!
Class 1: February 24, 2010, Noon-1 pm EST
Class 2: March 2, 2010, 8-9 pm EST
Cost: FREE

Tickets: http://amyjogoddard.eventbrite.com

Web: http://www.amyjogoddard.com

Many women are super empowered in the world, very successful and able to freely assert themselves—but they are unable to carry this power into their sexual lives, leaving them feeling insecure, or deprived of a core power they question whether they can really have. Many cultural factors, including a lack of know-how and role models, contribute to this gap. When your role models for what is sexually powerful come from narrow depictions of women in ubiquitous advertising, music videos or even pornography, it’s hard to figure out what your authentic sexual power actually looks like!
In this engaging and thought-provoking teleclass, you’ll discover:

• 4 core reasons why women become sexually disempowered
• 4 Essential elements that can assist you to nurture and grow
your sexuality, no matter where you are right now
• How your own creativity can nurture your sexuality and help
you come closer to your core sexual self
• 6 steps to personally empower yourself sexually

Sexuality educator Amy Jo Goddard will discuss the gaps and patterns she has observed over her 15 year sexuality career, and provide concrete ways women can access their most authentically powerful sexual selves. Women of all sexual orientations and identities are welcome to be a be part of this dynamic class, to begin to dialogue about feeling more confident in their own sexuality and with their sexual and intimate partners.

Category: Blog, Co-Sponsored Event, Events /

Sexuality, Virginity & “Purity” Series Part 2: Her Burning Bra

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This series of posts from the community is in preparation for Paradigm
Shift’s next event, “The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women”
A Discussion with JESSICA VALENTI, Author & Feministing.com
Founder/Editor on TUES, FEB. 23rd, 7pm, NYC. We want to hear your
stories. View call for submissions- deadline 2/19- Click here!

Read more

Category: Blog, Co-Sponsored Event /

Sexuality, Virginity & “Purity” Series Part 1: -velation

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This series of posts from the community is in preparation for Paradigm
Shift’s next event, “The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women”
A Discussion with JESSICA VALENTI, Author & Feministing.com
Founder/Editor on TUES, FEB. 23rd, 7pm, NYC. We want to hear your
stories. View call for submissions- deadline 2/19- Click here!

by Barrie Kreinik

This poem explores the violence inherent in the language of virginity loss, the coercive power of that language, and the idea that many girls are led to believe that they should allow their virginity to be taken from them forcibly or prematurely, rather than being willing participants in the taking.

-velation

Under meteorelectric blankets, blossoms
burst, ascending to full-on bloom in gobs
of sweat. Bouquets of wishes wash
away in spatters. Water
the flower bed, flour the batter;
bed her – deflower. A battery
of thrusts, a quarter hour
til the sheets pull back to witness.
No -lief, no -pair or -cover. Just
a smatter.

Sex crimes are designs of the Times: page-four
valentines and Hallmark rhymes, ripped
from the heads of latex lines and
-ceptacles. Found in the Park,
the parking lot – we learn from watching, practice
on our prey.

Park here, to punk, to play, to pluck
the strings of stinging hearts, to prick
the pillow and to pop the plush red fruit.
This thing’s been bought, coerced; its price
inflated when the crash of high school hit.
You’ll let me if you love me and some listen,
but the rip is real. That version of a queen
is stuff of stories.

-Cognizing her descent, the cherry -members
what her branches warned, and falls
from graceful pit…then takes her needle up
to sew again; to fix her torn-up hem, to bite the thread,
to nege the re- and make -conciliation.
First base is free, but he stole home too early.

Whatsamatter – dontcha love me, girlie?

Category: Blog, Co-Sponsored Event /

Book Review- Thirty Miles to Rosebud by Barbara Henning

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By Jo Anne Fordham

Overlapping physicalities – of region, maternity, self, landscape, and consanguinity – sift luminously, but pointedly through the descriptions of yoga-practitioner Katie’s breathtaking stake-out of her upper peninsula Michigan home (the UP) after an adult life planted squarely in New York City’s East Village. Katie, the photographer protagonist of Barbara Henning’s latest work, Thirty Miles to Rosebud, has cut all ties with her second home by leaving a rent-stabilized apartment situated in the work primarily for taking leave – of lovers, of the womb, of the city – to deliver a shoebox to the best friend who preceded her to New York, then vanished.

The book itself is just such a point of departure: ostensibly set in the 70’s as a young woman works her way into, sizes up, and grows through the world as we may live it, the sustained sense of time and ricochet between presences for those who never quite inhabit any agreeably defined concept of place comprises the real story here. Katie’s rurality is sure-footed, and her urbanity unforced, albeit heavily predicated on a Michigan few have bothered to imagine, much less describe.

The story she tracks is made of smoke, water, and snow, slips and falls, pavement and squish, and the loose threads that unceasingly bind the people who matter to us when time stops. Henning’s text makes loops through moments in Detroit and New York City, Southeast and South Asia, Wisconsin on into the U.S. Southwest, and the bodies and conversations of men and women in each loop. Her snapshot prose, however, best articulates that which cannot be captured by the drive-through diversion, or lingering hope and division, which may even bring it to life, and which we all know far too well unless we are very young Katie – the beauty and fragility of experience, the web of imaginary ties that may turn out, in fact, to be the only ones we know we can count on, and the fact that our shapes coexist in something as mild and ephemeral as the desire that a child be born safely, the slight overlap of a tooth.

Barbara Henning’s Blog:

http://barbarahenning.blogspot.com

Buy Thirty Miles to Rosebud– click here

Category: Blog, Jo Anne Fordham /

LGBTQ Marriage in NY Protest- sponsored by Queer Rising

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Category: Blog, Co-Sponsored Event, Events /

Call for Submissions- Blog/Video/Graphic Art responses- Sexuality, Virginity & “Purity”

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Call for guest blog, video, and graphic art submissions in preparation for Paradigm Shift’s next event:

“The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women”
A Discussion with JESSICA VALENTI, Author & Feministing.com Founder/Editor on TUES, FEB. 23rd, 7pm, NYC  Buy Tickets Now- click here.

Submission Deadline- Extended: 2/21- Sunday

You can answer any one of the following questions- submissions of any length welcome, including poetry and graphic art:

– How do you define virginity? Where do you think this definition came from (i.e. society, parents, friends)?

– Imagine a world without the concept of virginity and “purity”- what would that look like?

– How has the concept of virginity and “purity” effected your sex and love life?

– Did you attend abstinence-only classes? What did you think?

– Were you brought up to think of female sexuality as “dirty”? How did it effect you?

– What are some tangible ways we can change the culture of virginity?

Submit responses to blog@paradigmshiftnyc.com Please include how you would like to be credited (name, anonymous etc).  Video submissions- please submit YouTube private link.  Email subject line: Your Name- Blog post- 2/23 Event.

ParadigmShiftNYC.com content is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Category: Blog, Call for Submissions, Events / Tags: , , , ,

Partner Event: New Yorkers Against Religion-Based Bigotry

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New Yorkers Against Religion-Based Bigotry

Committee Against Satanic Panics: Witchhunts in Africa and Asia

Meetup.com invite:

http://www.meetup.com/nyarbb/calendar/11235363/

Malibu Diner

163 W 23rd Street
# 1 (near 7th Avenue)
New York, NY 10011
(212) 691-1369

How to find us
“Near BACK of diner, NYARBB literature on table”

We will discuss the (literal) witchhunts now happening in some countries in Africa and Asia. And we’ll discuss the connections between some African witchhunters and some American religious right wingers (e.g. Sarah Palin). And we’ll discuss ways to raise awareness about the witchhunts here in the West.

In some parts of Africa and Asia today, vast numbers of children are being abandoned or worse – often murdered, tortured, or mutilated – because they are suspected of being witches. Women too are often targeted, more so than men.

Worse yet, there are religious trends based here in the U.S.A. that have exacerbated the witchhunts. For example, Sarah Palin was “annointed,” with a blessing to protect her against witches, by neo-Pentecostal pastor Thomas Muthee, who is also an African witchhunter. Sarah Palin and Thomas Muthee are both part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a fast-growing international movement within Pentecostal Christianity and within “non-denominational” neo-Pentecostal Christianity. This movement’s practices include “strategic level spiritual warfare” (exorcism of “territorial demons”) and “occult level spiritual warfare” (witchhunts, at least in the form of praying against suspected witches, and sometimes worse). Here in the U.S.A., the now-disgraced former megachurch Pastor Ted Haggard once boasted of having driven suspected witches out of town.

In the past, Christian missionaries often discouraged witchhunts. But, today, the fastest-growing forms of Christianity, worldwide, are Pentecostalism and “non-denominational” neo-Pentecostalism, within which a rapidly growing movement is the New Apostolic Reformation, whose beliefs and practices encourage a witchhunt mentality.

Fortunately, there are some indigenous organizations opposing the witchhunts, and there are some indigenous secular charities that help victims of the witchhunts. We will discuss ways to raise awareness here in NYC, with the aim of encouraging various large groups around here to hold fundraisers to benefit indigenous anti-witchhunt activists and charities.

For more information, including links to news stories, see this thread on our message board. If you come across any other news stories about witchhunts (in the literal sense), please post links there.
Location and how to find us: We’ll be meeting at a diner on 23rd Street between 6th and 7th Avenues, closer to 7th. (The exact address, and other details, will be visible to you once you join this Meetup group.) The nearest subway stop is 23rd Street on the 1, 2, and 3 lines (7th Avenue). Other nearby subway stops are 23rd Street on the F line (6th Avenue), and 23 Street on the E and C lines (8th Avenue). For those coming from outside the city, the diner is also near the PATH train station at 23rd Street and 6th Avenue, and it is approximately a 10-minute walk from Penn Station.

Ask a waiter for “New Yorkers Against Religion-Based Bigotry.”

We’ll be at a table (or possibly a booth) near the BACK of the diner. There will be some NYARBB literature on the table.

For info on Witchhunts in Africa and Asia:

http://www.meetup.com/nyarbb/messages/boards/thread/7563607

Category: Blog, Co-Sponsored Event, Events /

Young Women’s Ethical Leadership Retreat

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YOUNG WOMEN’S ETHICAL LEADERSHIP RETREAT

March 12-14, 2010 (NY)
June 11-13, 2010 (CA)
June 18-20, 2010 (NY)
October 22-24, 2010 (NY)
Apply Today!

WHERE:NY Retreat Facility: The Woodhull Retreat Center, Ancramdale, NY 2-1/2 hours north of New York City in the beautiful Berkshire Mountain region.
CA Retreat Facilities: Danville, CA- 40 minutes north of San Francisco.

OVERVIEW: The Woodhull Institute Young Women’s Ethical Leadership Core Training program has been developed to educate young women who exhibit leadership potential in their careers, community or family life. This core training program is designed to educate a small group of women in the practical skill sets that are so necessary to succeed in today’s businesses, political and community environments. Participants in this program will be presented with the concepts of ethical leadership; taught professional development skills; and be directed to networks, mentors and resources that can channel their leadership aspirations into practical and attainable achievements.FORMAT: A team of Woodhull Professionals, Fellows, Associate Fellows and Scholars present basic empowerment skills that prepare young women for leadership roles in their communities and workplaces. The three-day or five-day retreat includes our core program modules: Ethics and Leadership Development, Public Speaking, Negotiation, Financial literacy, Advocacy and Identity/Voice workshops. Ethical leadership retreats may also include additional modules such as ethical and effective writing, mentoring/networking and civic education based on faculty availability and Woodhull participant need assessment. Meditation, hiking, journaling and group discussions are encouraged.
TARGET AUDIENCE: Women, ages 21-early 35, who are interested in increasing their capacity for professional and personal development through training workshops, group discussions and introspective work.

EXPECTED RESULTS OF TRAINING:
Build self-awareness
Build networks with women leaders
Increase skill levels in negotiation, financial literacy, public speaking
Increase tolerance for risk-taking
Deepen understanding of ethics and leadership
COST: Tuition is $395 and there is a fee of $100 a night for room and board.
Apply Now

Category: Blog, Co-Sponsored Event, Events /
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