Boomer: Schedule C-section before season starts. What???
 

CNN) -- I really am speechless, which makes it that much harder to write this column. After everything I've seen covering modern parenting over the past several years, I kind of feel like nothing can really surprise me anymore.

Oh how wrong I was, because when I heard what Boomer Esiason said, the former football star and now CBS NFL analyst and radio host, I thought he had to be joking.

Did he really suggest that New York Mets second baseman Daniel Murphy should have encouraged his wife to have a C-section, which is major surgery, so that he wouldn't have to miss Opening Day?

Murphy's wife went into labor, so he flew to be with her, missing the season's first two games. Major League Baseball allows a player to miss up to three games for paternity leave.

During a conversation on his radio show with co-host Craig Carton, Esiason, a father of two, said he would never have done what Murphy did.

"Quite frankly, I would have said C-section before the season starts," said Esiason. "I need to be at Opening Day. I'm sorry. This is what makes our money. This is how we're going to live our life. This is going to give my child every opportunity to be a success in life. I'll be able to afford any college I want to send my kid to because I'm a baseball player."

What about family, Esiason? What about not scheduling a major surgery that takes up to four weeks or longer to recover from (I should know; I had two unplanned C-sections!) just to avoid missing the first two games of a 160-plus game season?

For his part, Murphy, whose wife ended up having a C-section, is shrugging off any criticism of his decision.

"That's the choice of parents that they get to make," said Murphy. "That's the greatness of it. You discuss it with your spouse, and you find out what you think works best for your family."

Not surprisingly, outrage in social media to Esiason's remarks was pointed solidly in one direction.

"There are so many reasons this is so wrong," said a mother on my Facebook page, who had three C-sections, none of them by choice.

"He has no idea what in the world he is talking about," she added. "(A C-section) is no walk in the park for mom or dad, whether you are a baseball player or not, whether you are in the off season or not."

Another woman, also on Facebook, cited what she called "the lack of sensitivity and sophistication" around these issues of gender and reproduction. "I also think (despite what he says), if it were (his) wife, he would not feel the same way."

Don't show me the money, said Sue Scheff, a parenting advocate and author, on Facebook, criticizing Esiason for suggesting that money should be more important than family. "Games happen a lot. How often is the birth of your child?" she asked.

"Easy for him to say, he'll never have to have one," said a man, who did not want to be identified, referring to a C-section.

Esiason made his comments during an exchange with his co-host, who thought Murphy should have gotten back to work once the baby was born instead of taking an additional day of paternity leave. (Another WFAN radio host, Mike Francesa, also took issue with Murphy being out for two games.)

In Esiason's defense, his first comments when the subject came up were that Murphy had "legal rights to be there if he wants to be there."

As a football player, he's also coming from the mindset of his sport and how key players haven't traditionally missed one of the season's games for a birth, noted @heymatt on Twitter. In fact, Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco's wife gave birth one hour before game time in September, and Flacco played that game against the Cleveland Browns.

But what got under people's skin, more than anything, was the idea of suggesting that a wife have major surgery to accommodate her husband's sports schedule.

"Major surgery should only be used when medically advised, not for convenience," said @elia_eltringham, also on Twitter.

C-sections may be scheduled because of the estimated size of the child and the age of the mother, or if a mother had a prior C-section, doctors say. Some women have chosen to have them because of fears of incontinence after a vaginal birth.

Nearly a third of births are currently done by C-section, which is a significant jump from the 20% of deliveries resulting in C-sections in 1996, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Lillian Schapiro of Atlanta said she has seen a movement away from scheduled C-sections in her practice.

"I would say a few years ago, there was more of a trend to have scheduled C-sections, and now there is much more a move back to allowing nature to run its course, and people wanting to have a more natural experience," said Schapiro, an ob/gyn doctor affiliated with Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta.

Dr. Lynn Friedman, an ob/gyn with Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and one of my doctors during my pregnancies, said her practice also hasn't seen a rise in elective C-sections.

"A purely elective (C-section) ... someone who just says 'I don't want to labor,' I mean, that's not that common, and that's really still very much discouraged," said Friedman.

"For someone to say 'my career is something that would make my wife schedule a section' ... I think in the 21st century ... that's really still a very sexist thing to say, and I think a ball team should understand that their player should be with his wife. I mean, I just think that's grotesque."

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/04/living...rebar_facebook

Boomer, your male privilege and sexism is showing even in your poor excuse for an apology. Just STFU already.
 

Boomer Esiason "Apologizes" For Comments On Murphy’s Paternity Leave

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – WFAN co-host Boomer Esiason says he’s reached out to the New York Mets and is “truly sorry” for “insensitive comments” made earlier this week regarding second baseman Daniel Murphy’s paternity leave.

“I just want to say again on this radio show that in no way, shape or form was I advocating anything for anybody to do. I was not telling women what to do with their bodies. I would never do that. That’s their decision, that’s their life and they know their bodies better than I do. And the other thing, too, that I really felt bad about is that Daniel Murphy and Tori Murphy were dragged into a conversation, and their whole life was exposed. And it shouldn’t have been.

“And that is my fault. That is my fault for uttering the word ‘C-section’ on this radio station. And it all of a sudden put their lives under a spotlight, and for that I truly apologize. I tried to reach out to Daniel yesterday through intermediaries over there at the New York Mets, and to his credit, he answered all of his questions yesterday. I’m sorry that he had to go through that. No man should have to go through that. And certainly Daniel Murphy, who we both admire much as a baseball player as anybody else — and all I can say is that I truly, truly, feel terrible about what I put them through. So for that I certainly apologize.

“I spoke with (Mets public relations chief) Jay Horwitz yesterday and was texting back and forth with (COO/co-owner) Jeff Wilpon, and I think Daniel — I can’t speak for Daniel — I think he wants to put everything behind him, he wants to try to play baseball, he wants to try to become a dad, he wants to try to do all the right things in life, and he has every right to do that. And again, like I said, I apologize for putting him and his wife in the midst of a public discussion that I basically started by uttering insensitive comments that came off very insensitive. And for that I apologize, and that’s really all I can do.

“The other thing I do want to say is that my friends — our friends — over at the March of Dimes also reached out to me yesterday. And I immediately called them back and talked to them, and they kind of re-educated me on their mission statement. And you and I (co-host Craig Carton) have been a part of the March of Dimes luncheon for many years, and I go back all the way to 1994 with them, and they were very gracious in re-educating me and making me understand what their mission statement was. And I agree wholeheartedly in their mission statement.

“I can only hope that people understand that my comment — my flippant comment — wasn’t made in any way, shape or form to insult anybody. But obviously it did. And for that I am truly sorry.”

He added: “Again, I just want to reiterate one more time that if I in any way, shape or form insulted anybody, that was not my intention. My flippant remark was insensitive. I’ll leave it at that. And again, I feel terrible for the Murphy family, because what should be the greatest time in their life turned out to be somewhat of a firestorm that I personally put them into. And for that hopefully they can find forgiveness in their heart.”

“My deep apologies to both Daniel and Tori Murphy for creating an intrusion into a very sacred and personal moment in their lives, and that’s the birth of their son, Noah. Daniel is the Mets’ second baseman, whose brief paternity leave led to a flippant and insensitive remark that I sincerely regret.

(In the) meantime, I’m very grateful to my many friends over at the March of Dimes who graciously reached out and re-educated me that if a pregnancy is healthy, it is medically beneficial to let the labor begin on its own rather than to schedule a C-section for convenience. In fact, babies born just a few weeks early have double the risk of death compared to babies born after 39 full weeks of pregnancy. As their promotional campaign says, ‘Healthy babies are worth the wait.’ And as I proud father, I couldn’t agree more.”

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/04/...ternity-leave/

Oh Really?
 

Maxim model Paulina Gretzky doesn't play professional golf but she is engaged to PGA tour star Dustin Johnson and has two famous parents, hockey great Wayne Gretzky and actress Janet Jones Gretzky.

That apparently was enough for Golf Digest to put her on its cover. It was also enough to irk players on the LPGA Tour, the New York Times reports.

"We don’t get respect for being the golfers that we are," two-time major winner Stacy Lewis said, according to the paper. "Obviously, Golf Digest is trying to sell magazines. But at the same time you’d like to see a little respect for the women’s game."

Seven-time major winner Juli Inkster seemed to feel the same way. "It’s frustrating because it’s Golf Digest; it’s not Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. I think they should maybe recognize some of the great women golfers that we have," she said, according to the Times

http://www.golfdigest.com/blogs/the-...459-132023.jpg

So, WTF is it Golf Digest? Christina Kim, a REAL LPGA player doesn't fit your image?
http://www2.pictures.gi.zimbio.com/L...Yh6lXcRHtl.jpg

Golf Digest, last I saw, you are a GOLF magazine, not Maxim, not Playboy. There are real, life women golfers whom you could choose to be on the cover. How fucking unsurprising this is to me. BOO!

Note: I, Happy_Go_Lucky played competetive golf as well as taught for many years. When I played, as well as the awesome other female players, the LAST thing we were concerned about is how fuckable we could make ourselves for the dudes.

Follow up
 

Dear Golf Digest. Did you consider these LPGA members to be on the cover?

http://forums.steroid.com/attachment...440%5B1%5D.jpg

http://espn.go.com/i/magazine/new/ho...er_rosales.jpg

http://www.totalprosports.com/wp-con.../Na-On-Min.jpg

http://cdn.thesandtrap.com/0/08/525x...battach773.jpg

These women REALLY are golfers.....Damn!

Happy-Go-Lucky. There is no link to an article I can see. Maybe this is just your commentary?

As an aside to everyone, it is hard to find links to the articles posted unless you put them at the top of your post. :glasses: Also, I think that all posts should have links, even just photos. Used to be standard here.

Just my two cents.

Re: Links
 

http://www.golfdigest.com/blogs/the-...-doing-on.html

http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/mo...icle-1.1746710

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/pa...132635952.html

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2...nd-controversy

Breitbart Unapologetic After Sexist Ads Cost the Site a Top GOP Congressman's Column
 

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy has asked for a column he penned for Breitbart California to be removed from the site in the wake of a sexist ad controversy. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was depicted in a poster for the news site's launch on her hands and knees in a bizarre, punk-inspired "street art" homage to Miley Cyrus. Democrats, including Pelosi, have blasted the ads as “foul, offensive and disrespectful to all women.”

McCarthy topped the bill of Breitbart California’s conservative contributors from the state, the jewel in the crown of a list that includes Fox News host Greg Gutfield and Rep. Tom McClintock. But it appears that McCarthy, the third-ranking House Republican, is standing in solidarity with Pelosi at the expense of the outlaw conservative credibility attached to Breitbart. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a frequent contributor to Breitbart News, promoted the news site last week, and wrote, “Breitbart California will only help our party evolve, not die” and called on California Republicans to “[e]volve, adapt or die.”

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times about the images, McCarthy spokesman Matt Sparks said, “We didn’t condone them. We thought it was the right thing to do to ask for the column to be removed.” Another spokesman, Mike Long, told ABC News, “The images are inappropriate. We requested that Whip McCarthy’s piece be taken down.”

Breitbart’s defense largely revolves around the argument that Democrats do the same thing to Republican women all the time. After the ad controversy swelled into frothing Internet outrage on Monday, Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle compared the Pelosi ad to a 2013 Saturday Night Live skit in which Michelle Bachmann was depicted by none other than Miley Cyrus (her again), writhing around with Taran Killam’s perma-tan, tank top-wearing John Boehner in a political parody of the video for her song, "We Can't Stop."

“Cyrus herself raunchily depicted Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) in a Saturday Night Live skit touching her crotch while writhing on the ground, shaking her backside in tight shorts, and sticking out her tongue and licking people with a gay, hypersexual John Boehner,” Boyle writes, which makes us wonder which is more offensive to Breitbart: Cyrus as Bachmann, or a gay Boehner.

http://news.yahoo.com/breitbart-unap...JmMQR2dGlkAw--

The Ads

Senate Republicans Block Paycheck Fairness Act For Third Time
 

Senate Republicans blocked a vote on Wednesday to open debate on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would hold employers more accountable for wage discrimination against women. The Senate voted 53 to 44 to move forward on the bill, falling short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster.

The bill would prohibit retaliation against employees who share their salary information with each other, which supporters say would eliminate the culture of silence that keeps women in the dark about pay discrimination. It would also require the Department of Labor to collect wage data from employers, broken down by race and gender, and require employers to show that wage differentials between men and women in the same jobs are for a reason other than sex.

All Republicans present and one Independent, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), voted against proceeding to debate the bill. All Democrats and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) voted in favor.

"At a time when the Obama economy is already hurting women so much, this legislation would double down on job loss, all while lining the pockets of trial lawyers," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said before the vote. "In other words, it's just another Democratic idea that threatens to hurt the very people that it claims to help."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) criticized McConnell's caucus for opposing the bill.

"Are they so repulsed by equal pay for hardworking women that they'll obstruct equal pay for equal work?" he said Wednesday before the vote. "I'm at a loss as to why anyone would decline to debate this important issue."

The bill is part of the Democrats' larger policy push, ahead of the November election, to increase economic security for women, which includes proposals to raise the minimum wage, allow workers to earn a certain amount of paid family and sick leave and expand affordable childcare and pre-Kindergarten for working parents.

"This is not just an issue of fairness," President Barack Obama said in a speech on Tuesday. "It’s also a family issue and an economic issue, because women make up about half of our workforce and they’re increasingly the breadwinners for a whole lot of families out there. So when they make less money, it means less money for gas, less money for groceries, less money for child care, less money for college tuition, less money is going into retirement savings."

U.S. Census Bureau data shows that women who work full-time earn an average of 77 cents for every dollar men earn in a year. When you compare women and men with the same education and experience levels working the same jobs, the pay gap shrinks, but there is still an unexplained gap of 7 to 9 percent, economists estimate, suggesting persistent pay discrimination against women.

Most Republicans in Congress object to all of the Democrats' proposals related to women's economic security. Senate Republicans have blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act twice before, claiming that it will only result in more lawsuits against employers. GOP lawmakers slammed the Paycheck Fairness Act again on Tuesday, calling it "condescending" to women.

"Many ladies I know feel like they are being used as pawns, and find it condescending [that] Democrats are trying to use this issue as a political distraction from the failures of their economic policy," Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.), the GOP conference's vice chair, said Tuesday at a press conference.

Equal pay advocates expressed their dismay after Wednesday's vote, suggesting the consequences will be felt in November.

"Today's vote is a disappointment for women and families across the United States. Considering the impact of the gender pay gap, it's mystifying that the Senate can't even agree to debate it!" said Lisa Maatz, the vice president of government relations at the American Association of University Women. "That's what happened today –- GOP senators essentially filibustered equal pay for women. Given the size of the gender voting gap, Republicans are foolish to cede this issue to Democrats."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...n_5118254.html

Iraq ready to legalise childhood marriage
 

Children in Iraq could be legally married before the age of nine under sweeping legislation tabled on Tuesday that introduces new religious restrictions on women's rights.

As almost its last act before elections at the end of the month, the Iraqi parliament looks likely to pass new marital rules for its majority Shia community with a draft law criticised by human rights activists as "legalised inquality"

The legislation has been approved by the governing coalition in an effort to attract support from Shia Muslims in the April 30 vote.

Current Iraqi law sets the legal age for marriage at 18 without parental approval and states girls as young as 15 can be married only with a guardian's approval. It does not allow for special provisions according to sect.

But the legislation, known as the Jaafari law, introduces rules almost identical to those of neighbouring Iran, a Shia-dominated Islamic theocracy.

Ayad Allawi, a former Iraqi prime minister, warned on Tuesday that approval of the law would lead to the abuse of women. "It allows for girls to be married from nine years of age and even younger," he said. "There are other injustices [contained in it] too."

While there is no set minimum age for marriage, the section on divorce includes rules for divorces of girls who have reached the age of 9 years.

Marital rape is condoned by a clause that states women must comply with their husband's sexual demands. Men are given guardianship rights over women and the law also establishes rules governing polygamous relationships.

Hanaa Edwar, a well-known activist and head of the charity Al-Amal ("Hope" in Arabic), has campaigned against the law as a setback for women's rights in a country that has struggled since the 2003 invasion.

"It turns women into tools for sexual enjoyment," she said. "It deletes all their rights."

Human Rights Watch, the US-based organisation, has issued a plea for the Iraqi government to abandon the legislations.

"Iraq is in conflict and undergoing a breakdown of the rule of law," Basma al-Khateeb, a women's rights activist, said in a Human Rights Watch report. "The passage of the Jaafari law sets the ground for legalised inequality."

Supporters of the draft, named after a Shiite Muslim school of jurisprudence, say it simply regulates practices already existing in day-to-day life. Officials said there has been a surge in under 18s being married off since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-marriage.html

Professors are Less Likely to Mentor Female and Minority Students, Especially in Business School
 

According to Wharton professor Katherine Milkman's new study, released on Tuesday, professors are less likely to want to mentor female and minority students. Especially in fields that lead to the most lucrative careers.

Milkman explained her research on NPR's Morning Edition. To determine how professors respond to different students looking for mentoring, Milkman and her colleagues Modupe Akinola and Dolly Chough created fake student emails with names that are representative of different genders and racial groups. These "students" emailed professors at top universities to see if they could meet about their work. Professors were more likely to respond, and respond positively, to white men. Even female and minority faculty are more likely to help the white guys. Milkman explains,

" There's absolutely no benefit seen when women reach out to female faculty, nor do we see benefits from black students reaching out to black faculty or Hispanic students reaching out to Hispanic faculty."

Faculty bias is particularly entrenched in areas of study that lead to the best-paying jobs, like the natural sciences and business. "The very worst in terms of bias is business academia," Milkman says. "We see a 25-percentage-point gap in the response rate to caucasian males versus women and minorities."

It's this kind of bias that explains why women excel in college but still reach a glass ceiling in their careers, especially in business. Women currently hold 60 percent of bachelor's degrees in the U.S., but that achievement isn't reflected in the number of women excelling at Fortune 500 companies. Next fall, more Latinos will be enrolled as freshmen in the University of California system than whites for the first time. But white students, especially males, will still have an easier time finding a professor to help them transition from college to career.

In her now-legendary advice book on women and careers, Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg has an entire chapter titled "Don’t Ask Anyone to be Your Mentor." She advises that women seek answers to questions from a variety of people in the office, instead of focusing on finding one mentor. But college is a time when it would be great to have one professor dedicated to helping you with your academic and career development. When female and minority students put themselves out there, ask for help, and get no response or a negative response, it's got to be frustrating. No wonder women tend to have less confidence once they get out into the workforce.

http://www.thewire.com/culture/2014/...school/361047/

Navy reassigns ex-Blue Angels commander after complaint he allowed sexual harassment
 

The Navy has reassigned a former commander of the Blue Angels, its acrobatic fighter squadron, and is investigating allegations that the elite team of pilots was a hotbed of hazing, sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination, documents show.

The Navy announced Friday that it had relieved Capt. Gregory McWherter, a two-time commander of the Blue Angels, of duty for alleged misconduct. At the time, the Navy did not describe the nature of the accusations or provide other details except to say that the case remained under investigation.

But an internal military document that a Navy official inadvertently e-mailed to a Washington Post editor states that a former member of the Blue Angels filed a complaint last month accusing McWherter of promoting a hostile work environment and tolerating sexual harassment. The complaint described an atmosphere rife with sexually explicit speech, the open display of pornography and jokes about sexual orientation.

The Navy officer is the latest in a string of senior military commanders to come under investigation for sexual misconduct or other misbehavior. Congress and the White House have grown especially frustrated at the Pentagon’s struggles to police sex crimes and harassment in the ranks.

The Navy appeared to move swiftly after the former Blue Angels member filed the complaint March 24 with the Navy inspector general. The complaint alleged that McWherter encouraged or allowed sexual harassment and lewd activity to occur when he commanded the Blue Angels during two stints between 2008 and 2012.

McWherter did not respond to e-mails seeking comment. Late Wednesday, in response to a request for comment, the Navy confirmed the circumstances that led to the probe. The Navy also released a statement from Vice Adm. David H. Buss, the commander of Naval Air Forces, who said, “We remain fully committed to accountability, transparency, and protecting the integrity of ongoing investigations.”

According to McWherter’s biography, which the Navy has removed from a public Web site, he is an alumnus of the Citadel and graduated from the Navy’s famous “Top Gun” fighter pilot school in 1995.

The Blue Angels are a flight demonstration team that performs daring maneuvers at air shows and before large crowds at other public events. It is a major honor for pilots selected to join; the Navy treats the squadron as a valuable recruitment tool and a vivid symbol of its aviation firepower.

The commander of the unit is chosen by a panel of admirals and serves as the Blue Angels’ lead pilot.

Although the investigation has not been completed, Navy officials decided that the preliminary findings warranted taking action. McWherter was fired from his new job as executive officer of Naval Base Coronado near San Diego. He has been temporarily reassigned to other duties.

Summaries of the complaint and investigation are contained in a five-page internal document, labeled “official use only,” that was drafted by Navy public affairs officers in anticipation of media coverage.

The document included talking points and prepared quotes attributed to Navy admirals, expressing concern about the gravity of the case. The material was being assembled in the event that further details of the investigation became public.

McWherter was a commander highly regarded by many in the Navy. He was brought back to lead the Blue Angels for a second stint in 2011 after the unit was temporarily grounded that year for performing a dangerous barrel roll too close to the ground during a show in Lynchburg, Va.

Upon leaving the team in November 2012, he told the Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal that he had no regrets.

“If being with the Blue Angels was the last time I fly a Navy plane, that’s a pretty good way to go out,” he said.

In the face of several ethics scandals over the past 18 months, the Pentagon has repeatedly pledged to hold commanders accountable for their actions. At the same time, however, the military has tried to suppress details about many embarrassing episodes.

For example, the Army announced in June, without elaboration, that it had suspended its top general in Japan for allegedly mishandling a sexual assault case. On Tuesday, after obtaining a copy of the investigative report under the Freedom of Information Act, The Post disclosed that the general was given a plum job at the Pentagon even though he had violated regulations by failing to refer the sexual assault complaint to criminal investigators.

In January, after obtaining another batch of investigative documents, The Post reported that the Pentagon had disciplined three other generals for personal misconduct.

One was found guilty of assaulting his mistress. A second joked in e-mails that he sexually gratified himself after meeting a member of Congress whom he described as “smoking hot.” The third kept a bottle of vodka in his desk and was investigated for having an affair, according to the documents.

At the same time, it appears that some military leaders have become highly sensitive to the issue and are quick to launch investigations at any hint of sexual impropriety or ethical misbehavior in the ranks.

In February, the Army announced it had suspended a brigade commander at Fort Carson, Colo., and in a highly unusual move, would not allow him to deploy with his soldiers to Afghanistan. Again, Army officials did not divulge what had prompted the decision.

A copy of the investigative report in that case, however, shows that the commander was suspended after three female soldiers alleged that he had made insensitive comments during a meeting to discuss sexual assault policies.

The commander, Col. Brian Pearl, was later cleared of wrongdoing and allowed to join his troops in Afghanistan. A copy of the investigative report was first obtained and published Tuesday by the Gazette newspaper of Colorado Springs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...washingtonpost

Kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls taken as brides by militants, relatives told
 

Two weeks ago more than 230 Nigerian girls were kidnapped from their school by a local terrorist group, and as the search wears on, the Guardian reports, families are starting to lose hope.

As Smart News wrote earlier, the perpetrators are assumed to be part of a group of militants that calls itself Boko Haram, a terrorist organization tied to Al Qaeda. The group's name translates to “western education is sin.” Boko Haram has been on a campaign against schools around Nigeria, though the group's targets also include markets, churches, mosques and other public places.

It's been 14 days since the girls went missing and no progress has been made on tracking their whereabouts, either by the military or by groups of machete-wielding parents searching through the countryside. The search for the kidnapped girls also has been muddled by misinformation. In the immediate wake of the kidnapping, says BuzzFeed reporter Jina Moore, the Nigerian military claimed to have found and freed the girls and captured one of the terrorists involved—a claim that was proven wrong and ultimately retracted. And, according to a report by Voice of America, the Boko Haram terrorists are threatening to kill the girls if the search operations aren't called off.

Northeastern Nigeria has been in a state of emergency for a year, writes the Guardian. The school from which the 234 girls (from 15 to 18 years old) were kidnapped was the only one still open in the region. The girls had been called back to class to sit an exam.



Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-...GF4T3mgbw3p.99
-------------------------------------



Kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls taken as brides by militants, relatives told
Relatives say they have been told of mass weddings involving insurgents and some of the girls abducted two weeks ago



For two weeks, retired teacher Samson Dawah prayed for news of his niece Saratu, who was among more than 230 schoolgirls snatched by Boko Haram militants in the north-eastern Nigerian village of Chibok. Then on Monday the agonising silence was broken.

When Dawah called together his extended family members to give an update, he asked that the most elderly not attend, fearing they would not be able to cope with what he had to say. "We have heard from members of the forest community where they took the girls. They said there had been mass marriages and the girls are being shared out as wives among the Boko Haram militants," Dawah told his relatives.

Saratu's father fainted; he has since been in hospital. The women of the family have barely eaten. "My wife keeps asking me, why isn't the government deploying every means to find our children," Dawah said. The marriage reports have not been confirmed officially, and rely on eyewitnesses.

The 14 April abduction of the girls – students aged between 16 and 18 who were sitting a physics paper at their school, one of a handful in troubled Borno state that had opened specially for final exams – shocked a nation inured to violence during a five year-insurgency.

Desperate parents launched their own rescue attempts in the 60,000 sq km Sambisa forest where the girls were being held. Security sources told the Guardian that at least three rescue attempts had been scuppered.

This week, former prime minister Gordon Brown, the United Nations' special adviser on girls' education, will visit Nigeria to launch a campaign to raise funds and awareness of the schoolgirls' plight. "We cannot stop terrorism overnight but we can make sure that its perpetrators are aware that murdering and abducting schoolchildren is a heinous crime that the international authorities are determined to punish," he said.

Reports of the mass marriage came from a group that meets at dawn each day not far from the charred remains of the school. The ragtag gathering of fathers, uncles, cousins and nephews pool money for fuel before venturing unarmed into the thick forest, or into border towns that the militants have terrorised for months.

On Sunday, the searchers were told that the students had been divided into at least three groups, according to farmers and villagers who had seen truckloads of girls moving around the area. One farmer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the insurgents had paid leaders dowries and fired celebratory gunshots for several minutes after conducting mass wedding ceremonies on Saturday and Sunday.

"It's unbearable. Our wives have grown bitter and cry all day. The abduction of our children and the news of them being married off is like hearing of the return of the slave trade," said Yakubu Ubalala, whose 17- and 18-year-old daughters Kulu and Maimuna are among the disappeared.

The parents are planning a mass rally on Saturday to lobby the government for official updates rather than having to rely on reports from local people.

Nigeria's armed forces face an uphill battle against the insurgents, who operate in small, mobile units and are drawn from communities that spill across the country's porous desert borders. Near daily aerial bombardments have been halted as ground troops have poured into the forest in search of the girls.

"We are trying, but our efforts are being countered in a way that it is very clear they are being tipped off about our movements. Any time we make a plan to rescue [the girls] we have been ambushed," said an artillery soldier among a rescue team announced by presidential decree over the weekend. In one clash, he said, 15 soldiers were killed by the insurgents.

"We know where these girls are being held in the forest, but every day we go in and come out disappointed. Definitely somebody high up in the chain of command is leaking up information to these people," said the soldier, whom the Guardian was able to reach three times during shift breaks. Nigeria's president, Goodluck Jonathan, said in 2012 that Boko Haram had secret backers among government and security officials.

Another soldier deployed to Borno state said: "In my 13 years of service, I have never been in terrain this big and tough. There is desert and there is forest – you cannot imagine how difficult both of them are."

He said there had been intelligence reports of the militants moving groups of girls to Marte – a known training camp – and to the Gwoza hills, a range of caves and valleys spanning the border with Cameroon.

The kidnappings have sparked debate on whether foreign intervention could help stabilise Nigeria. Officials have long ruled out such a move.

Nelson Uwaga, a representative at an official conference set up by presidential decree to discuss national unity as Nigeria celebrates a century of nationhood, said: "If countries can help us by way of arming our people through modern surveillance equipment, for defence and all that, it will be most welcome. [But] what the Boko Haram is doing is not a formal kind of fight but a guerrilla kind of fight, and it is only the local people that will tell you how to fight it."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...arriage-claims

U.S. military sexual assault reports jumped 50 percent last year
 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Reported sexual assaults in the U.S. military jumped 50 percent last year, the Pentagon said on Thursday, and officials welcomed the spike as a sign that a high-level crackdown has made victims more confident their attackers will be prosecuted.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the jump in reported sexual assaults to 5,061 in the 2013 fiscal year from 3,374 the previous year, was "unprecedented."

He announced six new directives to expand the fight, including an alcohol policy review and an effort to encourage reporting by male victims. Men are thought to represent about half of the victims of military sexual assault but made up only 14 percent of the reports that were investigated.

"We believe victims are growing more confident in our system," Hagel told a Pentagon news conference. "Because these crimes are underreported, we took steps to increase reporting and that's what we're seeing."

Despite increased focus on the issue over the past year, the military has continued to face embarrassing incidents in which officers have been accused of tolerating sexual misconduct and even encouraging it, rather than fighting the problem.

Critics said the Pentagon's numbers on increased reporting demonstrated little improvement in the proportion of cases going to trial or the percentage of convictions.

A total 484 cases went to trial in the 2013 fiscal year that ended on September 30 and 370 people were convicted of an offense, the report said. That compared with 302 trials the previous year and 238 convictions.

"You can't tell me that only one in 10 cases are worthy of going to trial. That's like saying 90 percent of those who come forward are lying," Representative Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, told Reuters in an interview.

Speier and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, have led a push to remove prosecution of sex crimes from the military chain of command and put it in the hands of specialized prosecutors. The effort was narrowly defeated earlier this year, but Thursday's report revived calls for its consideration.

"Today's report is deeply troubling and shows the scourge of sexual assaults has not been brought under control and our current military justice system remains broken," Gillibrand said in a statement.

Other lawmakers saw progress. Senator Claire McCaskill, who worked on legislation to develop a more forceful military response to the problem, said the increased reporting was encouraging.

"We know that the majority of survivors, both military and civilian, choose not to report their assaults," the Missouri Democrat, a former sex crimes prosecutor, said in a statement. "This data suggests that the number of brave men and women in uniform choosing to pursue justice is increasing."

Sexual assault is vastly underreported, and a separate military survey conducted in 2012 concluded there were some 26,000 sex crimes in the military that year, from rape to abusive sexual contact.

The survey is conducted every two years, so there was no survey with the annual report this year to use as a basis for projecting total sex crimes in the services.

The figures last year provoked outrage and led to a broad effort across the military to crack down on sex crimes and sexual misbehavior. But despite the push, a number of high-profile officers are being investigated for their actions.

The Navy said last week it was investigating allegations of misconduct by Captain Gregory McWherter, the former commander of the Blue Angels precision flight squadron. He was accused of allowing and sometimes encouraging "lewd speech, inappropriate comments, and sexually explicit humor," the Navy said.

Major General Michael Harrison also was recently disciplined for failing to take appropriate action in response to sexual assault allegations while commander of U.S. Army forces in Japan. He had been suspended from the post last June when the allegations were made.

Army General Martin Dempsey, the highest-ranking military officer, told defense bloggers earlier this month that the department had a limited window of opportunity to demonstrate it could deal with the sexual assault problem.

"If it occurs that after a period of very intense and renewed emphasis on this that we can't solve it, I'm not going to fight it being taken away from us," the military's press service quoted him as saying.

http://news.yahoo.com/pentagon-due-a...111510864.html

U.S. Department of Education Releases List of Higher Education Institutions with Open Title IX Sexual Violence Investigations
 

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) released today a list of the higher education institutions under investigation for possible violations of federal law over the handling of sexual violence and harassment complaints.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in all education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance. In the past, Department officials confirmed individual Title IX investigations at institutions, but today's list is the first comprehensive look at which campuses are under review by OCR for possible violations of the law's requirements around sexual violence.

"We are making this list available in an effort to bring more transparency to our enforcement work and to foster better public awareness of civil rights," Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine E. Lhamon said. "We hope this increased transparency will spur community dialogue about this important issue. I also want to make it clear that a college or university's appearance on this list and being the subject of a Title IX investigation in no way indicates at this stage that the college or university is violating or has violated the law."

As with all OCR investigations, the primary goal of a Title IX investigation is to ensure that the campus is in compliance with federal law, which demands that students are not denied the ability to participate fully in educational and other opportunities due to sex.

The Department will not disclose any case-specific facts or details about the institutions under investigation. The list includes investigations opened because of complaints received by OCR and those initiated by OCR as compliance reviews. When an investigation concludes, the Department will disclose, upon request, whether OCR has entered into a resolution agreement to address compliance concerns at a particular campus or found insufficient evidence of a Title IX violation there.

The list of institutions under investigation for Title IX sexual violence issues will be updated regularly and made available to the public upon request by contacting OCR or to media by contacting the Press Office at press@ed.gov.

Releasing this list advances a key goal of President Obama's White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault to bring more transparency to the federal government's enforcement activities around this issue. The Obama administration is committed to putting an end to sexual violence—particularly on college campuses. That's why the President established the Task Force earlier this year with a mandate to strengthen federal enforcement efforts and provide schools with additional tools to combat sexual assault on their campuses.

As part of that work, the Education Department released updated guidance earlier this week describing the responsibilities of colleges, universities and schools receiving federal funds to address sexual violence and other forms of sex discrimination under Title IX. The guidelines provide greater clarity about the requirements of the law around sexual violence—as requested by institutions and students.

All colleges, and universities and K-12 schools receiving federal funds must comply with Title IX. Schools that violate the law and refuse to address the problems identified by OCR can lose federal funding or be referred to the U.S. Department of Justice for further action.

Under federal law, sexual violence refers to physical sexual acts perpetrated against a person's will or where a person is incapable of giving consent -- including rape, sexual assault, sexual battery, sexual abuse and sexual coercion.

OCR's mission is to ensure equal access to education and promote educational excellence throughout the nation through the vigorous enforcement of civil rights. OCR is responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination by educational institutions on the basis of disability, race, color, national origin, sex, and age, as well as the Boy Scouts of America Equal Access Act of 2001.

http://www.ed.gov/news/press-release...s-open-title-i

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The list of institutions being investigated can be found at the end of the article. Follow the link Dapper ;)

Rape, rape culture and the problem of patriarchy
 

By the end of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, two key questions were on the table for those who not only are aware of rape but would like to end men’s violence against women.

First, do we live in a rape culture, or is rape perpetrated by a relatively small number of predatory men?

Second, is rape a clearly definable crime, or are there gray areas in sexual encounters that defy easy categorization as either consensual or non-consensual?

If those seem to be tricky, or trick, questions, don’t worry. There’s an easy answer to both: patriarchy (more on that shortly).

This year’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month in April was full of the usual stories about men’s violence, especially on university campuses. From football-obsessed state schools to elite private campuses, the reality of rape and rape culture was reported by journalists and critiqued by victim-survivors.

But April also included an unexpected debate within the anti-violence movement about the appropriate boundaries of the discussion about rape and rape culture.

“In the last few years, there has been an unfortunate trend towards blaming ‘rape culture’ for the extensive problem of sexual violence on campuses,” wrote the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, or RAINN, in a letter offering recommendations to the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault (see the government’s final report). “While it is helpful to point out the systemic barriers to addressing the problem, it is important to not lose sight of a simple fact: Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime.”

RAINN expressed concern that emphasizing rape culture makes “it harder to stop sexual violence, since it removes the focus from the individual at fault, and seemingly mitigates personal responsibility for his or her own actions.”

Feminists pushed back, pointing out that it shouldn’t be difficult to hold accountable the individuals who commit acts legally defined as rape, while we also discuss how prosecuting rapists is made difficult by those who blame victims and make excuses for men’s violence, all of which is related to the way our culture routinely glorifies other types of men’s violence (war, sports and action movies) and routinely presents objectified female bodies to men for sexual pleasure (pornography, Hollywood movies and strip clubs).

Meanwhile, conservative commentators picked up on all this, using it as a club to condemn the always-demonizable feminists for their allegedly unfair treatment of men and allegedly crazy critique of masculinity.

I’m a man who doesn’t believe feminists are unfair or crazy. In fact, I believe the only sensible way to understand these issues is through a feminist critique of — you guessed it — patriarchy.

Rape and rape-like behavior

Before wading into the reasons we need feminism, let’s consider a hypothetical:

A young man and woman are on a first date. The man decides early in the evening that he would like to have sexual intercourse and makes his attraction to her clear in conversation. He does not intend to force her to have sex, but he is assertive in a way that she interprets to mean that he “won’t take no for an answer.” The woman does not want to have sex, but she is uncertain of how he will react if she rejects his advance. Alone in his apartment — in a setting in which his physical strength means she likely could not prevent him from raping her — she offers to perform oral sex, hoping that will satisfy him and allow her to get home without a direct confrontation that could become too intense, even violent. She does not tell him what she is thinking, out of fear of how he may react. The man accepts the offer of oral sex, and the evening ends without conflict.

If that sex happened — and it’s an experience that women have described (see Flirting with Danger by Lynn Phillips and the companion film) — should we describe the encounter as consensual sex or rape? In legal terms, this clearly is not rape. So, it’s consensual sex. No problem, right?

Consider some other potentially relevant factors: If a year before that situation, the woman had been raped while on a date, would that change our assessment? If she had been sexually assaulted as a child and still, years later, goes into a survival mode when triggered? If this were a college campus and the man was a well-known athlete, and she feared the system would protect him?

By legal standards, this still clearly is not rape. But by human standards, this doesn’t feel like fully consensual sex. Maybe we should recognize that both those assessments are reasonable. In short, rape is a definable crime that happens in a rape culture — once again, both things are true.

What is patriarchy and why does it matter?

Patriarchy is a term rarely heard in mainstream conversation, especially since the backlash against feminism took off in the 1980s. So, let’s start with the late feminist historian Gerda Lerner’s definition of patriarchy as “the manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of male dominance over women in the society in general.” Patriarchy implies, she continued, “that men hold power in all the important institutions of society and that women are deprived of access to such power. It does not imply that women are either totally powerless or totally deprived of rights, influence and resources.”

Feminism challenges acts of male dominance and analyzes the underlying patriarchal ideology that tries to make that dominance seem inevitable and immutable. Second-wave radical feminists in the second half of the 20th century identified men’s violence against women — rape, child sexual assault, domestic violence and various forms of harassment — as a key method of patriarchal control and made a compelling argument that sexual assault cannot be understood outside of an analysis of patriarchy’s ideology.

Some of those feminists argued that “rape is about power not sex,” but other feminists went deeper, pointing out that when women describe the range of their sexual experiences it becomes clear there is no bright-line distinction between rape and not-rape, but instead a continuum of sexual intrusion into women’s lives by men. Yes, men who rape seek a sense of power, but men also use their power to get sex from women, sometimes under conditions that are not legally defined as rape but involve varying levels of control and coercion.

So, the focus shouldn’t be reduced to a relatively small number of men who engage in behavior we can easily label as rape. Those men pose a serious problem and we should be diligent in prosecuting them. But that prosecution can go on — and, in fact, will be aided by — recognizing the larger context in which men are trained to seek control and pursue conquest in order to feel like a man, and how that control is routinely sexualized.

Patriarchal sex

If this seems far-fetched, think about the ways men in all-male spaces often talk about sex, such as asking each other, “Did you get any?” From that perspective, sex is the acquisition of pleasure from a woman, something one takes from a woman, and men talk openly among themselves about strategies to enhance the likelihood of “getting some” even in the face of resistance from women.

This doesn’t mean that all men are rapists, that all heterosexual sex is rape or that egalitarian relationships between men and women are impossible. It does mean, however, that rape is about power and sex, about the way men are trained to understand ourselves and to see women.

Let me repeat: The majority of men do not rape. But consider these other categories:

Men who do not rape but would be willing to rape if they were sure they would not be punished.
Men who do not rape but will not intervene when another man rapes.
Men who do not rape but buy sex with women who have been, or likely will be, raped in the context of being prostituted.
Men who do not rape but will watch films of women in situations that depict rape or rape-like acts.
Men who do not rape but find the idea of rape sexually arousing.
Men who do not rape but whose sexual arousal depends on feeling dominant and having power over a woman.
Men who do not rape but routinely masturbate to pornography in which women are presented as objectified bodies whose primary, or only, function is to provide sexual pleasure for men.

Those men are not rapists. But is that fact — that the men in these categories are not, in legal terms, guilty of rape — comforting? Are we advancing the cause of ending men’s violence against women by focusing only on the acts legally defined as rape?

Rape is rape, and rape culture is rape culture

Jody Raphael’s book Rape is Rape: How Denial, Distortion, and Victim Blaming Are Fueling a Hidden Acquaintance Rape Crisis points out that if we use “a conservative definition of rape about which there can be no argument” — rape as an act of “forcible penetration” — the research establishes that between 10.6 percent and 16.1 percent of American women have been raped. That means somewhere between 12 million and 18 million women in this country today live as rape victim-survivors, if we use a narrow definition of the crime.

Because no human activity takes place in an ideological vacuum — the ideas in our heads affect the way we behave — it’s hard to make sense of those numbers without the concept of rape culture. A rape culture doesn’t command men to rape, but it does make rape inviting, and it reduces the likelihood rapists will be identified, arrested, prosecuted, convicted and punished. It’s hard to imagine any meaningful efforts to reduce, and someday eliminate, rape without talking openly and honestly about these matters. But RAINN argues that such denial is exactly the path we should take.

Why should we fear talking about the socialization process by which boys and men are trained to see themselves as powerful over women and to see women as sexual objects? Why should we fear asking critical questions about all-male spaces, such as athletic teams and fraternities, where these attitudes might be reinforced? Could it be a fear that the problem of sexual assault is so deeply entwined in our taken-for-granted assumptions about gender that any serious response to the problem of rape requires us to all get more radical, to take radical feminism seriously?

This does not mean all men are rapists, that all male athletes are rapists, or that all fraternity members are rapists. It does mean that if we want to stop sexual violence, we have to confront patriarchy. If we decide we aren’t going to talk about patriarchy, then let’s stop pretending we are going to stop sexual violence and recognize that, at best, all we can do is manage the problem. If we can’t talk about patriarchy, then let’s admit that we are giving up on the idea of gender justice and goal of a world without rape.

It’s easy to understand why people don’t like this formulation of the problem, given that anything beyond a tepid liberal, postmodern feminism is out of fashion these days and radical feminist analyses of male dominance are rarely part of polite conversation. Sometimes people concede the value of such an analysis, but justify the silence about it by claiming, “People can’t handle it.” When someone makes that claim, I assume what they mean is “I can’t handle it myself,” that it’s too much, too painful to deal with.

That’s not hard to understand, because to confront the reality of rape and rape culture is to realize that vigorous prosecution of the small number of men who rape doesn’t solve the larger problem.

If anyone still doubts that rape culture exists and is relevant, how else would we explain the Yale University fraternity members who marched on campus while shouting sexist chants, including “No means yes, yes means anal,” as part of a 2010 pledge event?

Everyone recognizes the mocking reference to the anti-rape message, “No means no,” which expresses women’s demand that men listen to them. These Yale men reject that. The second part of their chant — “Yes means anal” — states that women who agree to sex are implicitly agreeing to anything a man wants, including anal penetration. This will make sense to anyone who is aware of the prevalence of anal penetration in today’s pornography marketed to heterosexual men. In those pornographic scenes, women sometimes beg for that penetration and other times are forced into it, but the message is the same: Men’s pleasure is central.

In this one chant, these men of Yale — one of the most elite universities in the United States, which produces some of the country’s most powerful business and political leaders, including five presidents — clearly express a patriarchal view of gender and sex. Their chant is an endorsement of rape and an expression of rape culture.

Is a feminist critique of rape and rape culture a threat to me as a man? I was socialized in a patriarchal culture to believe that whatever feminists had planned, I should be afraid of it. But what I have learned from radical feminists is that quite the opposite is true — feminism is a gift to men. Such critique does not undermine my humanity, but instead gives me a chance to embrace it.

http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature...em-patriarchy/

Gang-Raped Indonesian Woman May Be Caned Publicly
 

An Indonesian woman who was gang-raped by men accusing her of having extramarital sex may be caned publicly for violating Islamic law, an official said Wednesday.

The 25-year-old widow said she was raped by eight men who allegedly found her with a married man in her house. The men reportedly beat the man, doused the two with sewage, and then turned them over to Islamic police in conservative Aceh province.

The alleged attack occurred early Thursday in Lhokbani, a village in East Aceh district.

The head of Islamic Shariah law in the district, Ibrahim Latief, said his office has recommended the widow and the married man be caned nine times for violating religious law, pending an investigation. Its preliminary finding was that the two were about to have sex at that time, but Latief contended they violated Shariah law by being in the same room together. He said they also admitted they had sex earlier.

Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation of 240 million people, has a policy of secularism but allows Aceh, a predominantly Muslim province on the northern tip of Sumatra, to implement a version of Sharia Islamic law.

Police have arrested three of the eight men and are hunting for the others.

East Aceh police chief Lt. Col. Hariadi said those arrested are being questioned on charges of rape. One of the accused is a 13-year-old boy, who would be charged as an adult but prosecuted in a closed-door trial.

Latief said the eight could be caned for raping the woman, but "it will be too lenient if they just received the same punishment of nine strokes."

The criminal charge of rape carries a maximum penalty of 15 years.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/...aning-23619038

Easy On The Ears: GOP Ads Adapt To Reach Women Voters
 

It's only April, but it looks and sounds like October. More than $80 million has been spent on political advertising in only about a dozen Senate battleground states.

About half that amount is targeted at women.

"We have allowed ourselves to be branded [in] a way I do not feel is representative of who we are as Republicans," says Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., of her party's negative reputation on women's issues.

Many ads aimed at women take the most obvious approach: Republicans putting their female candidates front and center; Democrats attacking Republicans for waging a war on women.

But there's more to it than that, says Republican ad-maker Ashley O'Connor.

"Women process information differently than men," O'Connor says. "So much of political advertising focuses on conflict, and facts and figures, and I think that we're already starting to see, when reaching women voters, there's just new techniques need to be used, and a different tone, and more storytelling."

O'Connor singles out an ad aired by Monica Wehby, a pediatric neurosurgeon seeking the Republican nomination for Senate in Oregon. In the ad, a woman tells the story of Webby operating on her daughter.

"Dr. Wehby was going to open her back and reconstruct my daughter's entire lower spine," the woman says. "She just hugged me and kissed my forehead, and she said, 'It's going to be OK, sweetheart. I've got her, and I am going to see you in a couple of hours.' "

"This is a 60-second ad and it's not particularly issue-driven," O'Connor says of the spot. "It sort of goes to this point that when talking to women, I don't think you necessarily have to be delivering factual information to move them. I think connecting with their heart and really trying to build emotion is more effective."

That may sound a little sexist, but appealing to emotions is what all effective advertising does. And the fact that Republicans are trying to do it is the biggest new development in political ads aimed at women.

Aiming For Tough, But Not Harsh

In a typical Republican superPAC ad from 2012, for instance, a man intones a list of Democrats' alleged failings over a soundtrack of ominous music: "Family incomes down, 40 percent living paycheck to paycheck, and Obamacare's new tax on middle-class families."

This year, the GOP has ditched the baritone narrator, the scary music and the facts and figures. Instead, the party is doing what Democrats have been doing for many years: using softer voices and more personal stories.

A Republican superPAC ad running this year features a woman who narrates in a conversational tone: "People don't like political ads. I don't like them either. But health care isn't about politics. It's about people. It's not about a website that doesn't work ... It's about people, and millions of people have lost their health insurance. ... Obamacare doesn't work."

Elizabeth Wilner, senior vice president with Kantar Media, praises the ad.

"It's a very clean ad," Wilner says. "The tone of the ad, her tone, is very sympathetic and very easy on the ears. It's a new kind of attack ad, and it is not a harsh ad in any way, but the message itself is very tough."

Endorsed By Wives, Moms And Daughters

There are other trends this year that both parties hope will appeal to women. Family members are everywhere in ads, especially moms and daughters.

In a Florida special election to fill the seat vacated by Republican Rep. Trey Radel, candidate Curt Clawson's mother appears in an ad to endorse her son. In the same race, Paige Kreegel's wife criticizes "nasty" campaign ads.
Democrats have an urgent problem this year: how to get their most reliable female supporters to become more reliable voters.

In Iowa, the children of Monica Vernon, also running for Congress, promise their mom "will never stop working for the middle class."

Not only is the content of the ads changing, but so are the places in which they appear. Jim Margolis, a veteran Democratic ad-maker, says it's no longer enough to air an ad on daytime TV, or even the nightly news, to reach women.

"We are using data and analytics to try to determine what are the actual programs that women are watching, Margolis says. "And to try to determine, as well, what are those issues, for that particular group, that are going to be the most resonant, that they're going to find the most compelling."

Wherever women are digitally, Margolis says, political ads will find them. A woman who is a Democratic target voter in a Senate battleground state might see campaign ads all day online.

"When you log on in the morning to check the weather, there's a pretty good chance that somebody is going to be talking to you right there," he says.

Your browsing history can say a lot about you, Margolis says, including your gender, interests and issues that matter to you.


The Shoot-'Em-Up Approach

These new ways of targeting women voters, with content tailored to women's concerns, are becoming common. But there's always an exception to the rule. Take the much-imitated ad in which a male politician attacks — literally — the IRS code or a piece of legislation passed by President Obama.

This week, that macho format was adopted by Republican Joni Ernst, a pistol-packing mama running for Senate in Iowa. Ernst already earned attention for an ad about her experience castrating hogs. In the new ad, Ernst rides a Harley to a gun range, and fires off six shots at a target.

"Joni Ernst will take aim at wasteful spending," the narrator says. "And once she sets her sights on Obamacare, Joni's gonna unload."

It seems that even the shoot-'em-up TV ad has achieved gender equality, for better or worse.

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/10/311189...h-women-voters

An Honest Dictionary Of Words Used To Describe Women
 

When it comes to talking about women, "saying what you mean" and "meaning what you say" don't always have much in common. Words like "b*tchy" and "slutty" are clearly sexist and meant to insult, but even seemingly neutral adjectives have become euphemisms for "uniquely female character flaw."

Used by both men and women, these words are the linguistic equivalents of wolves in sheeps' clothing, often disguised as flattery while used to subtly undermine the woman being described. It's time to strip them down.

Below is a brief compendium of adjectives that are often used to describe women -- and what they really mean:

Bossy: Has on one or more occasion suggested that someone, man or woman, has made a factual error. (Related, know-it-all)

Clingy: Describes a woman who insists on responding to a partner's cues of romance, intimacy and commitment by reciprocating them.

Cold: Used to describe a woman who does not smile enough, or whose resting face does not suggest joyous contentment.

Crazy: Attributes women's behavior to an error in reason independent of speaker's actions, thereby dismissing her feelings as irrational, "while simultaneously absolving ... men from responsibility." A label most women seek to avoid at all costs.

Cute: Used among men when referring to an attractive woman whose intellectual and comedic allure happen to be more pronounced than her conventional sex appeal.

Exotic: Mainstream media's preferred adjective for a non-white female who is also beautiful.

Feisty: Feisty is sassy with a better resume. It's essentially results-based sass, invoked to acknowledge the achievement and/or ambition of a woman, while also warning against it. Remarkably useful to misogynists, "feisty" implies enough aggression to diminish a woman's accomplishment without completely dismissing it. (Related, sassy)

High-maintenance: Wears makeup and/or requires regular attention from significant other. (Related, low-maintenance)

Intense: Applies to women who express their feelings, opinions and expectations freely, and politely excuse suitors not up to matching them.

Laid back/chill: Deeper implication than "casual or relaxed in manner." Often a celebration of a woman's ability to sublimate the emotional excesses of her gender. A woman who is "chill" reacts to her male friend or partner's questionable behavior the way he wants her to -- usually, not at all. Related to the "cool girl" as referenced in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl.

Low-maintenance:
1. Used to describe a woman willing to repress her own needs in order to make no demands on her current or desired partner.
2. A woman who is not interested enough in said partner to make demands. (Related, high-maintenance)

Peppy/Bubbly: Describes an attractive woman with nicely-balanced serotonin levels. Use patronizingly when referring to women whose friendliness and enthusiasm you find annoying.

Perky: Identifies a well-rested, usually petite woman.

Prude: A woman who doesn't engage in whatever romantic or sexual encounter a man has suggested. Use liberally when said woman is not excessively apologetic about her lack of sexual experience or interest therein.

Pushy: Most recently, used to describe a remarkably accomplished woman whose high standards and willingness to insist on them aggressively just kinda rubs colleagues the wrong way. (Related, bossy)

Sassy: An adjective used to describe a woman with a personality. (See, personality: broad spectrum of verbal behavior spanning "is not clinically mute" and "enjoys humor," all the way to "expresses an opinion.") Serves to attribute a woman's comedic or intellectual superiority to a specifically feminine trait rather than actual competence. Related, sassy black woman: Describes self-reliant African-American woman with strength of character. Close association with "angry black woman."

Sweet: Used to indicate a general lack of sass or feistiness. Frequently serves to co-opt a woman's kindness in order to present her as intellectually inferior.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0....html?ir=Women

What’s So Scary About Smart Girls?
 

WHEN terrorists in Nigeria organized a secret attack last month, they didn’t target an army barracks, a police department or a drone base. No, Boko Haram militants attacked what is even scarier to a fanatic: a girls’ school.

That’s what extremists do. They target educated girls, their worst nightmare.

That’s why the Pakistani Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai in the head at age 15. That’s why the Afghan Taliban throws acid on the faces of girls who dare to seek an education.

Why are fanatics so terrified of girls’ education? Because there’s no force more powerful to transform a society. The greatest threat to extremism isn’t drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.

In that sense, Boko Haram was behaving perfectly rationally — albeit barbarically — when it kidnapped some of the brightest, most ambitious girls in the region and announced plans to sell them as slaves. If you want to mire a nation in backwardness, manacle your daughters.

What saddens me is that we in the West aren’t acting as rationally. To fight militancy, we invest overwhelmingly in the military toolbox but not so much in the education toolbox that has a far better record at defeating militancy.

President Obama gives the green light to blow up terrorists with drones, but he neglects his 2008 campaign promise to establish a $2 billion global fund for education. I wish Republicans, instead of investigating him for chimerical scandals in Benghazi, Libya, would shine a light on his failure to follow through on that great idea.

So why does girls’ education matter so much? First, because it changes demography.

One of the factors that correlates most strongly to instability is a youth bulge in a population. The more unemployed young men ages 15 to 24, the more upheaval.

One study found that for every 1 percentage point increase in the share of the population aged 15 to 24, the risk of civil war increases by 4 percent.

That means that curbing birthrates tends to lead to stability, and that’s where educating girls comes in. You educate a boy, and he’ll have fewer children, but it’s a small effect. You educate a girl, and, on average, she will have a significantly smaller family. One robust Nigeria study managed to tease out correlation from causation and found that for each additional year of primary school, a girl has 0.26 fewer children. So if we want to reduce the youth bulge a decade from now, educate girls today.

More broadly, girls’ education can, in effect, almost double the formal labor force. It boosts the economy, raising living standards and promoting a virtuous cycle of development. Asia’s economic boom was built by educating girls and moving them from the villages to far more productive work in the cities.

One example of the power of girls’ education is Bangladesh, which until 1971 was (the seemingly hopeless) part of Pakistan. After Bangladesh gained independence, it emphasized education, including of girls; today, it actually has more girls in high school than boys. Those educated women became the backbone of Grameen Bank, development organizations like BRAC and the garment industry.

Likewise, Oman in the 1960s was one of the most backward countries in the world, with no television, no diplomats and radios banned. Not a single girl attended school in Oman. Then there was a coup, and the new government educated boys and girls alike.

Today, Oman is stable and incomparably better off than its neighbor, Yemen, where girls are still married off young and often denied an education. America is fighting Al Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Pakistan with drones; maybe we should invest in girls’ schools as Bangladesh and Oman did.

Girls’ education is no silver bullet. Iran and Saudi Arabia have both educated girls but refused to empower them, so both remain mired in the past. But when a country educates and unleashes women, those educated women often become force multipliers for good.

Angeline Mugwendere was an impoverished Zimbabwean girl who was mocked by classmates because she traipsed to school barefoot in a torn dress with nothing underneath. She couldn’t afford school supplies, so she would wash dishes for her teachers in hopes of being given a pen or paper in thanks.

Yet Angeline was brilliant. In the nationwide sixth-grade graduation examinations, she had the highest score in her entire district — indeed, one of the highest scores in the country. Yet she had no hope of attending seventh grade because she couldn’t afford the fees.

That’s when a nonprofit called the Campaign for Female Education, or Camfed, came along and helped pay for Angeline to stay in school. She did brilliantly in high school and is now the regional director for Camfed, in charge of helping impoverished girls get to school in four African countries. She’s paying it forward.

Educating girls and empowering women are also tasks that are, by global standards, relatively doable. We spend billions of dollars on intelligence collection, counterterrorism and military interventions, even though they have a quite mixed record. By comparison, educating girls is an underfunded cause even though it’s more straightforward.

Readers often feel helpless, unable to make a difference. But it was a grass-roots movement starting in Nigeria that grabbed attention and held leaders accountable to address it. Nigeria’s leaders perhaps now realize that they must protect not only oil wells but an even greater treasure: the nation’s students.

Likewise, any of us can stick it to Boko Haram by helping to educate a girl. A $40 gift at Camfed.org buys a uniform so that a girl can go to school.

We can also call on members of Congress to pass the International Violence Against Women Act, which would elevate the issue of sexual violence on the global agenda.

Boko Haram has a stronghold in northeastern Nigeria because it’s an area where education is weak and women are marginalized. Some two-thirds of women in the region have had no formal education. Only 1 in 20 has completed high school. Half are married by age 15.

Obviously, the situation in the United States is incomparably better. But we have our own problems. It’s estimated that 100,000 girls under 18 years old in the United States are trafficked into commercial sex each year. So let’s fight to #BringBackOurGirls in Nigeria but also here in the United States and around the world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/op...irls.html?_r=0

Three Deadliest Words in The World - It's A Girl
 

In India, China and many other parts of the world today, girls are killed, aborted and abandoned simply because they are girls. The United Nations estimates as many as 200 million girls(1) are missing in the world today because of this so-called “gendercide”.

Girls who survive infancy are often subject to neglect, and many grow up to face extreme violence and even death at the hands of their own husbands or other family members.

The war against girls is rooted in centuries-old tradition and sustained by deeply ingrained cultural dynamics which, in combination with government policies, accelerate the elimination of girls.

Shot on location in India and China, It’s a Girl reveals the issue. It asks why this is happening, and why so little is being done to save girls and women.

The film tells the stories of abandoned and trafficked girls, of women who suffer extreme dowry-related violence, of brave mothers fighting to save their daughters’ lives, and of other mothers who would kill for a son. Global experts and grassroots activists put the stories in context and advocate different paths towards change, while collectively lamenting the lack of any truly effective action against this injustice.

It’s a Girl is now available for screening events globally.


- See more at: http://www.itsagirlmovie.com/index.p....gvZy5k8T.dpuf

Sign 'joking' about domestic violence sparks outrage at Plano bar
 

PLANO — The handwritten sign over the bar at Scruffy Duffies in Plano read: "I like my beer like I like my violence. Domestic."

The words are now gone, but their impact lingers.

"I was like, 'Oh my gosh, do you see this?'" said 24-year-old Courtney Williams. She couldn't believe what she saw on the chalkboard inside Scruffy Duffies Saturday night.

Williams was offended.

"How does someone think it's OK to put something like that up there?" she asked.

Williams asked the female bartender who had written the sign to erase it. Then Williams asked two managers.

They did not take it down.

Williams left the establishment at the Shops at Legacy and posted every detail — along with a photo of the sign — on Facebook.

That post has gone viral.

Williams is surprised by the attention, but others are thrilled.

"My gut reaction was, 'Thank you Ms. Williams for standing up and saying this isn't OK,'" said Vanessa Vaughter, the education program manager at Hope's Door, a women's shelter in Plano. "I was surprised and sad that someone would think it's funny and a great way to sell beer."

The sign did come down after Williams left, according to some of her friends who remained at the bar.

Scruffy Duffies' owners took action on Tuesday. A regional manager told News 8 the manager who was on duty was indefinitely suspended without pay, but an owner suggested that manager could lose his job.

The regional manager also said a new system of checks and balances is in place for any sign that is posted in the bar. All messages henceforth will require approval.

The regional manager added that Scruffy Duffies is making a donation to Hope's Door, and inviting shelter representatives to hold a sensitivity training class for bar employees.

"When one in four women are affected by domestic violence — and in Collin County alone last year we had over 12,000 incidents of domestic violence — then this isn't something we joke about," Vaughter said.

Williams thinks Scruffy Duffies' pledge to work with Hope's Door is a step in the right direction. She's heard from some critics who think she was overly sensitive, but Williams is focusing on the survivors of domestic violence who are thanking her for her stance.

"I want to give them a voice," she said. "It can be a really powerful thing for change."

http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/Sign-...260868081.html

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A woman writing this, thinking it was amusing and a good way to sell beer, is exhibiting internal sexism and misogyny. We often dont realize how the messages we are bombarded with since birth become so much a part of us.
We also dont realize how these messages are derogatory and harmful to us as women.

Women Alert to Travel’s Darker Side
 

Between sun-seared shrubs and the collapsed remains of Istanbul’s Byzantine city walls, police found the body of an American tourist, Sarai Sierra, 33, in February 2013. Ms. Sierra, a New Yorker and a first-time traveler abroad, disappeared after near-constant contact with her family for two weeks. What happened to her is still a little unclear, but a Turkish man has reportedly confessed to killing her after supposedly trying to kiss her.

This is not a case of wrong place, wrong time. Ms. Sierra was not wandering off the beaten path. She was not engaged in risky behavior. She was on a trip hoping to practice photography, according to news reports. This is a terrifying case of what can — and does — happen to female travelers abroad.

Since her death early last year, a number of reports of attacks on female tourists have made headlines. An Italian tourist was reportedly raped by police officers in Mexico in the same month that Ms. Sierra’s body was found. An American tourist was raped in a store in Israel last June. A Norwegian woman was raped (then jailed, for having “unlawful sex”) in Dubai; she and the man accused in her attack were eventually pardoned last summer. On Jan. 15, a Danish woman, 51, reported being raped at knife point in New Delhi. She said she had approached the seven or eight men who attacked her to ask for directions to her hotel. In March, a British woman said she was raped by a security guard in a luxury hotel in Egypt.

Whether it is on a bus in New Delhi or at a resort in Acapulco, Mexico, the risk of an assault may seem ever-present, if recent high-profile attacks in places like these are indicative of a general state of danger for female travelers. Such news reports have tripped an alarm for many of us who venture beyond familiar destinations, some seeking the sort of solo, immersive experiences that are becoming increasingly common.

We weigh our bodily integrity against our desire to see the world. For us, for women, there is a different tourist map of the globe, one in which we are told to consider the length of our skirts and the cuts of our shirts, the time of day in which we choose to move around, and the places we deem “safe.”

But what is the reality of violence against women now in the places we want to go — and should we be avoiding whole cities because of this risk, as some women are doing? What is the actual risk for women traveling abroad compared with the perception? I talked to statisticians and women’s rights advocates and visited a few countries where notorious cases have recently occurred to get a sense of what is happening.

Headlines in India

Since December 2012, ask most people what country they think of when they think of rape against tourists or others, and they will likely say India.

The brutality of the gang rape and murder of a young Indian medical student on a bus one December evening in New Delhi shocked many around the world. Protests erupted in huge numbers throughout India and beyond, and a government-led commission took an internal look at how the country prosecutes perpetrators of sexualized violence. But on the heels of the New Delhi attack came three more assaults on women in India that grabbed headlines. All three of the victims were foreigners: a Swiss woman during a camping trip with her husband in March 2013 in Madhya Pradesh state, central India; a British woman soon after that in her Agra hotel room; and a 30-year-old American woman in the resort town of Manali.

These attacks have apparently rattled people enough to affect tourism. The New Delhi-based Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry reported that three months after the woman’s death after the attack on the bus, foreign female tourism to India fell by 35 percent.

Still, the truth is that other countries are even more dangerous for women than India. Without firm statistics on violence against female tourists, the closest yardstick is violence against local women — which experts say far outnumbers the better-known tourist attacks.

“The fact is that the rate of rape in Mexico is higher than in India,” said Carlos Javier Echarri Cánovas, a professor of demography at El Colegio de México who studies violence against women. There were 15,000 rape complaints in Mexico in 2010 and about the same in 2011, according to government statistics. Mr. Echarri explained that while 18,359 rape cases were registered in India in the first quarter of 2012, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, Mexico has one-tenth the population of India.

Yet even these statistics aren’t conclusive. Reports of rape in all countries are hampered variously by corruption and a cultural willingness to ignore violence considered “normal,” even close to home. The compelling narrative has been that as more Western women travel farther afield, the more they are at risk. But that is hard to pinpoint statistically. It might raise the question of why few are asking about the safety of traveling as a woman in Western Europe and the United States, a country of more than 300 million people. In the United States about 270,000 women were victims of rape and sexual assault in 2010, according to the Department of Justice. (The department culled data from interviews with households, which means that these are rapes that may or may not have been reported to police.)

Various kinds of Internet searches that I conducted turned up very few news stories about attacks on women in these destinations: There’s one from July 2013 about a tourist from Georgia (the state, not the country) alleging rape in New York and another about a woman from Canada who says a handful of French policemen raped her in Paris in April. Mainly though, searching for news articles on the rape of foreigners in the United States yielded only their mirror image — reports of violence against American women abroad. But this does not mean there are fewer attacks taking place on Western soil.

Experts note that this trend, so to speak, is amplified by the media, which makes individual incidents seem part of a larger pattern. “On average, attacks against white women worldwide receive more coverage than attacks against women of color,” said Cristina Finch, director of Amnesty International USA’s Women’s Human Rights Program.

Looking at the Numbers

Experts I spoke to say they cannot know whether attacks on female tourists are actually increasing. Hard numbers are difficult to come by. None of these groups — UN Women, an agency focused on gender equality; the United States State Department; and nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs — keep data on violence against female tourists. The British Foreign Office, however, does release statistics on how many Britons request consular assistance after a sexual attack; in 2012-2013, 310 people requested assistance, with 138 saying they had been raped and 172 sexually assaulted — an increase of 9 and 12 percent for the year respectively, according to figures from the office’s “British Behavior Abroad Report.”

But those figures are hardly the end of the story. A number of experts tell me that it is possible that violence is on the rise in part because more women than ever are traveling alone, and are venturing ever farther off the beaten path.

For sheer numbers, consider that nearly 25 years ago there were seven million United States passports in circulation, said John Whiteley, a State Department spokesman. Now there are 118 million. Still, Mr. Whiteley said he was not sure he saw a trend when it came to violence against female travelers.

“We do know that over the years that violence against women has become increasingly talked about and reported,” said Ms. Finch of Amnesty International USA. She agreed that there was no way to know whether actual violence against female travelers was up.

Dina Deligiorgis, a spokeswoman at UN Women, said there has been increasing attention to violence against women and girls in the last five to 10 years for a number of reasons, including the passage of various resolutions in the United Nations and the start of the United Nations secretary-general’s UNiTE to End Violence Against Women campaign.

How Safe Are Local Women?

Every expert I spoke to, whether in India, Mexico, Brazil or elsewhere, said that cases of violence against international female tourists are not only more likely to make the news, they are also more likely to see justice than cases involving local women.

On Feb. 6, 2013, six female Spanish tourists were raped in Acapulco. On Feb. 13, Mexico’s attorney general, Jesus Murillo Karam, declared the case “resolved.”

Teresa Inchaustegui, the director of the Mexican government’s Center of Studies for the Advancement of Women and Gender Equity, said that though that case had wrapped up swiftly, there were thousands of unsolved rapes of local women every year. And she noted that the Acapulco mayor initially tried to downplay the attack on the women, saying it had hurt the image of the town and that such violence could have happened “anywhere in the world.” (He later apologized for his remarks.)

“It’s undoubtedly a double standard,” said Laura Carlsen, director of the nonprofit Americas Program of the Center for International Policy, of the government reaction to the tourist rapes versus those of local women. An often cited crime statistic in Mexico is that 98 percent of the crimes in the country go unpunished.

Last May, I decided to visit Mexico because the country has long been on the international danger radar — rashes of drug-war-related violence have left headless bodies across the country for years, and recorded violence against local women is staggering. In the northern city of Ciudad Juárez alone, hundreds of women have been killed or have disappeared since 1993.

The United States State Department warns that women should avoid being alone in the country, “particularly in isolated areas and at night” and that rape and sexual assault “continue to be serious problems in resort areas.”

Overall, a number of people who study gender in Mexico expressed something similar to what Mr. Echarri at the Colegio de México told me: “You have a patriarchal society, a misogynistic one, with a widely held belief that women are the property of men.” This, it would seem, can lead to sexualized violence — whether harassment or assault — and foreigners predictably draw attention.

A Dutch citizen, Rachel de Joode, lived in Mexico last year and said she felt there was a reason to be more cautious as a woman “just because of what I heard in the media and around me.” She said she would never go anywhere alone after 9 p.m. without truly knowing the area and using a “safe cab” (one called from a reputable company, not hailed off the street).

Mexico City has taken recent precautions, creating women-only buses in 2008 — women-only subway cars were already in place — on which a number of female tourists, including Ms. de Joode, said they felt safer. And while Ms. de Joode told me that she had been grabbed at in the mixed-gender subway a few times, she had experienced that and worse on the streets of Berlin and Amsterdam.

Lonely Planet, a travel guide for the slightly more intrepid backpack set, also seems to fall on the not-as-scary-as-it-appears side: “Despite often alarming media reports and official warnings, Mexico is generally a safe place to travel, and with just a few precautions you can minimize the risk of encountering problems,” it states online.

In my half-dozen trips to Mexico, I have never experienced any kind of serious sexual harassment. I have, however, been asked for a bribe by the police.

Some Blame the Victim

When it comes to perception versus reality, it might help to look to Turkey. I was recently in Istanbul for a conference on preventing atrocities. I walked in the same places Ms. Sierra walked and felt no danger whatsoever beyond burning my skin in the blasting sun. I was warned, though, when I asked at the front desk of my hotel for directions one evening to a particular part of the city to meet a friend. “Be careful of the men there,” the staff warned.

Like many major cities, Istanbul has its share of crime. But what I found so ominous about this warning was that I was not told to watch for pickpockets or scammers or even violence from the anti-government protests that were in full swing last summer. I was told to watch for men.

Even so, multiple tour operators I spoke to in Istanbul said Ms. Sierra’s murder has had little effect on tourism in Turkey. Government figures show that the number of foreigners arriving in Turkey in May 2013 increased by 18 percent compared with the same month the year before.

Istanbul Tour Services said they had seen no cancellations or drop in reservations after Ms. Sierra’s death. Hakan Haykiri, 51, who owns a store that sells tourist knickknacks in the neighborhood in which Ms. Sierra was found dead, agreed that the case had not affected his trade, dismissing the violence as too common globally to matter.

“The same things happen everywhere in the world and it does not affect tourism,” Mr. Haykiri said. But he went on to say: “If the woman does not flirt, a man would not attempt to do anything, any harassment. Everything starts with a woman.”

This kind of victim-blaming was not terribly uncommon among men I spoke to in Turkey. Erkan Turkan, 30, a manager at Istanbul’s Volare Tour, interrupted a question about whether Ms. Sierra’s murder had affected business by saying, “She was asking for trouble.”

Victim-blaming is hardly unique to Turkey. Sara Benson, who has written for the Lonely Planet guidebook series since 1999, described an attack she experienced in Malaysia. Riding an old, rickety bicycle to update the company’s guide, she found herself being followed and taunted by a man on a motorbike.

“He’s laughing and cackling and making masturbatory gestures,” she said. “He circles back and I start hurling rocks at him.”

Shaken, she went to the police a couple of villages over. But all she got was laughter when she described what happened, she said. “You’re a white woman traveling around by yourself,” she recalled an officer saying. “You got what you deserved.”

How to Minimize the Risk

So what kinds of precautions can a concerned traveler take? Minimizing risk, whether in a foreign city or a local one, whether you are a woman or a man, is common sense. One easy way to do that is to check the State Department’s website for travel warnings before you head out; the site is regularly being updated and includes cautions about things like carjackings in Mexico and gender-based violence in and around protest areas in Egypt. For more women-specific updates, there are many “What can I expect?” message boards out there, including ones by Lonely Planet. Also, it never hurts to carry the telephone number for your hotel and the local police with you.

One out of every three women worldwide will be physically, sexually or otherwise abused in her lifetime, according to a 2013 World Health Organization study. Julia Drost, the policy and advocacy associate in women’s human rights at Amnesty International USA, said such violence “knows no national or cultural barriers.”

The question then, in the end, is: Should all this violence — real or amplified — stop us from seeing the world?

Summing up what seems to be the underlying sentiment of many female travelers I spoke to, Jocelyn Oppenheim, an architectural designer in New York who has trekked extensively through India, said: “Bad things can happen, but bad things can happen when you get in a taxi in New York.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/25....html?referrer

Sergeant accused of sexually assaulting 12 female soldiers
 

ST. LOUIS (AP) — A Missouri-based Army drill sergeant has been accused of sexually assaulting 12 female soldiers during the past three years, including several while he was deployed in Afghanistan.

Staff Sgt. Angel M. Sanchez appeared at a pretrial hearing at Fort Leonard Wood on Wednesday and could face a court-martial later this year, defense attorney Ernesto Gasapin said Thursday. The Washington Post first reported on the charges against Sanchez.

Military court records indicate that Sanchez is accused of using his supervisory position as a drill sergeant with the 14th Military Police Brigade to threaten some of the women he's accused of assaulting.

He is accused of sexually assaulting four women and assaulting eight others by touching them inappropriately, said Tiffany Wood, a Fort Leonard Wood spokeswoman.

The charges, filed earlier this month, come amid persistent criticism by Congress over how the Pentagon handles sexual assaults. The U.S. Defense Department says more than 5,000 reports of sexual abuse were filed in the most recent fiscal year — a 50 percent increase from the previous 12 months.

The Pentagon's first formal report on sex assaults in its ranks — released two days after Sanchez was charged on May 13 — shows that in the vast majority of the cases the victim was a young, lower-ranking woman and the offender a senior enlisted male service member, often in the same unit.

Sanchez served one tour each in Iraq and Afghanistan, earning a Bronze Star, before arriving at the Missouri post in August. He's been assigned an office job with his unit as his legal case unfolds.

Several of the women Sanchez is accused of attacking testified at Wednesday's hearing. But Gasapin said the initial accuser chose not to attend the hearing.

"It starts as one allegation and spreads out," he said, referring to the investigation that led to multiple accusers coming forward. "We have serious questions about the credibility of the witnesses making these accusations."

The defense lawyer said he expects an investigating officer's full report to be complete by June, at which point Sanchez's case could be set for a court-martial. The charges could also be dismissed or downgraded, Gasapin said.

Military prosecutors say Sanchez's alleged crimes date back to his year in Afghanistan, which lasted from March 2011 until March 2012. Prosecutors allege that during that time, Sanchez assaulted a female soldier at Outpost Dandar in Kunar province and also had a sexual relationship with a soldier "subject to his direct control."

One of the alleged incidents took place at Fort Richardson, Alaska, according to military court records.

At Fort Leonard Wood, Sanchez is accused of forcing one woman to perform oral sex on him in an office he shared with other drill sergeants. That accuser said Sanchez suggested she would be kicked out of the Army if she didn't comply with his demands for sex.

"I can be your replacement for your girlfriend," he is accused of telling a Fort Leonard Wood soldier who is gay.

A married soldier in Afghanistan said that Sanchez, who was also married, told her and others that "I know you guys are married but it's OK if you have a deployment buddy."

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called sex assaults in the ranks "a clear threat" to male and female service-members when the Pentagon released its latest statistics.

In December, Congress approved changes to the Uniform Code of Military Justice that strip commanders of their ability to overturn military jury convictions. That law also requires a civilian review if a commander declines to prosecute a case and requires that any individual convicted of sexual assault face a dishonorable discharge or dismissal.

The law also provides alleged victims with legal counsel, eliminates the statute of limitations for courts-martial in rape and sexual assault cases and criminalizes retaliation against victims who report a sexual assault.

Federal lawmakers are considering even further changes, some of which are opposed by top military commanders.

Greg Jacob, a former Marine who now works for the Service Women's Action Network, said the charges against Sanchez suggest that the military "hasn't fixed the problem." He said the inherent power imbalance between a drill sergeant and a lower-ranking soldier make the allegations even more disturbing.

"You're taught to trust authority, trust the chain of command," said Jacob, the group's policy director. "You're dependent on these people for everything, from your food to your sleep to your safety."

http://news.yahoo.com/sergeant-accus...042859324.html

George Will: Being a victim of sexual assault is a “coveted status that confers privileges”
 

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.

Consider the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. “sexual assault.” Herewith, a Philadelphia magazine report about Swarthmore College, where in 2013 a student “was in her room with a guy with whom she’d been hooking up for three months”:

“They’d now decided — mutually, she thought — just to be friends. When he ended up falling asleep on her bed, she changed into pajamas and climbed in next to him. Soon, he was putting his arm around her and taking off her clothes. ‘I basically said, “No, I don’t want to have sex with you.” And then he said, “OK, that’s fine” and stopped. . . . And then he started again a few minutes later, taking off my panties, taking off his boxers. I just kind of laid there and didn’t do anything — I had already said no. I was just tired and wanted to go to bed. I let him finish. I pulled my panties back on and went to sleep.’”

Six weeks later, the woman reported that she had been raped. Now the Obama administration is riding to the rescue of “sexual assault” victims. It vows to excavate equities from the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults.

The administration’s crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by official repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from. The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 percent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, for example, that in the four years 2009 to 2012 there were 98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State. That would be 12 percent of 817 total out of a female student population of approximately 28,000, for a sexual assault rate of approximately 2.9 percent — too high but nowhere near 20 percent.

Education Department lawyers disregard pesky arithmetic and elementary due process. Threatening to withdraw federal funding, the department mandates adoption of a minimal “preponderance of the evidence” standard when adjudicating sexual assault charges between males and the female “survivors” — note the language of prejudgment. Combine this with capacious definitions of sexual assault that can include not only forcible sexual penetration but also nonconsensual touching. Then add the doctrine that the consent of a female who has been drinking might not protect a male from being found guilty of rape. Then comes costly litigation against institutions that have denied due process to males they accuse of what society considers serious felonies.

Now academia is unhappy about the Education Department’s plan for government to rate every institution’s educational product. But the professors need not worry. A department official says this assessment will be easy: “It’s like rating a blender.” Education, gadgets — what’s the difference?

Meanwhile, the newest campus idea for preventing victimizations — an idea certain to multiply claims of them — is “trigger warnings.” They would be placed on assigned readings or announced before lectures. Otherwise, traumas could be triggered in students whose tender sensibilities would be lacerated by unexpected encounters with racism, sexism, violence (dammit, Hamlet, put down that sword!) or any other facet of reality that might violate a student’s entitlement to serenity. This entitlement has already bred campus speech codes that punish unpopular speech. Now the codes are begetting the soft censorship of trigger warnings to swaddle students in a “safe,” “supportive,” “unthreatening” environment, intellectual comfort for the intellectually dormant.

It is salutary that academia, with its adversarial stance toward limited government and cultural common sense, is making itself ludicrous. Academia is learning that its attempts to create victim-free campuses — by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimizations — brings increasing supervision by the regulatory state that progressivism celebrates.

What government is inflicting on colleges and universities, and what they are inflicting on themselves, diminishes their autonomy, resources, prestige and comity. Which serves them right. They have asked for this by asking for progressivism.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...f0a_story.html

Indian minister says rapes happen 'accidentally'
 

New Delhi (AFP) - A minister from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling party has said rapes happen "accidentally" in the latest controversial remarks by a politician amid renewed anger over attacks against women.

Ramsevak Paikra, the home minister of central Chhattisgarh state who is responsible for law and order, said late on Saturday that rapes did not happen on purpose.

"Such incidents (rapes) do not happen deliberately. These kind of incidents happen accidentally," Paikra, of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which also rules at the national level, told reporters.

Paikra, who was asked for his thoughts on the gang-rape and lynching of two girls in a neighbouring state, later said he had been misquoted. His original remarks were broadcast on television networks.

The remarks come days after the home minister of the BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh state said rapes were "sometimes right, sometimes wrong".

The minister, Babulal Gaur, gave the remarks on Thursday at a time of growing outrage over the gang-rape and murder of the girls, aged 12 and 14, in northern Uttar Pradesh state late last month.

Modi, whose party came to power in a landslide election victory, has so far stayed silent over the rapes and has not addressed the politicians' comments.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav faced severe criticism for his perceived insensitivity over the attacks on the low-caste girls, who were found hanging from a mango tree after being sexually assaulted multiple times.

Yadav's father Mulayam Singh -- leader of the Samajwadi Party -- was also the target of public anger in April when he told an election rally that he opposed the recently introduced death penalty for gang-rapists, saying "boys make mistakes".

Women's groups have slammed the comments, saying they were evidence that politicians were unable to stem sexual violence because they lacked respect for India's women and were ignorant of the issues.

Politicians also came under fire after the fatal gang-rape of a student on a moving bus in New Delhi in December 2012, a crime that angered the nation and shone a global spotlight on India's treatment of women.

India brought in tougher rape laws last year after the Delhi attack, but they have failed to stem the tide of violence against women across the country.

At the time, several politicians sought to blame tight jeans, short skirts and other Western influences for the country's rise in rapes, while the head of a village council pointed to chowmein which he claimed led to hormone imbalances among men.

http://news.yahoo.com/indian-ministe...070139401.html
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Chow mein is now responsible for hormonal imbalances causing men to rape? That's a new one. :blink:

The only 'privilege' afforded to campus rape victims is actually surviving
 

Rape victims get called a lot of things. Sometimes it's "slut". For the 11-year-old gang rape victim in Texas, it was that she was a "spider" luring men into her web. It's not all bad, though - thanks to anti-violence activists, those who have been attacked also get called "survivors" and "brave". The last word I ever expected to hear to describe a rape victim is "privileged".

Yet in the Washington Post late last week, columnist George Will wrote about campus rape, claiming that being a victim in college has become "a coveted status that confers privileges", and that "victims proliferate" because of all these so-called benefits.

Ah, yes, the perks of being a rape victim! Here are just a few of the "privileges" that being raped at college confers onto women:

For Indiana University freshman Margaux J, it meant dropping out of school because even after her attacker was found guilty, the school refused to expel him.

Columbia University's Emma Sulkowicz had the great pleasure of enduring questions from a disciplinary panel that didn't believe being anally raped was physically possible without manufactured lubrication.

Andrea Pino, then a student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, was told by an academic advisor that she was "being lazy" for applying for medical leave after her rape.

And who doesn't look at Lizzy Seeberg – a St. Mary’s College student who killed herself a week after reporting being raped by a a Notre Dame football player – and not think, wow, how lucky!

It takes a particular kind of ignorance to argue that people who come forward to report being raped in college are afforded benefits of any kind. If the last few months of coverage of the rape epidemic on college campuses – including new stories from brave young women today in the Guardian – has shown anything, it's that survivors of sexual violence are treated abysmally by administrators, peers and campus police. But to someone like Will – who calls this a "supposed" scourge of rape and puts the term "sexual assault" in scare quotes – rape is hardly even a real thing.

To demonstrate the "capacious definitions of sexual assault" that Will believes are running rampant on campuses, the conservative columnist cites a case in which a woman said, "No, I don't want to have sex with you" ... only to have her alleged attacker proceed anyway. The only people who could find ambiguity in this are idiots and, well, rapists. (And even the latter, I imagine, would recognize this as an assault.)

In response to Will's column this week, women on Twitter started posting under #SurvivorPrivilege, a hashtag started by writer and anti-rape organizer Wagatwe Wanjuki. "#SurvivorPrivilege of graduating 6 years later than planned bc, yanno, rape. How covetable!," Wanjuki tweeted. Activist Katie Klabusich wrote, "#SurvivorPrivilege is getting to explain to truly would-be allies in your life that yes, your boyfriend could rape you. & it was rape-rape." Washington DC-based Robyn Swirling tweeted, "#SurvivorPrivilege was losing all my friends when they decided it was easier to remain friends with my rapist than stand with me."

The good news from Will's very bad, no-good column is that anti-rape activism is clearly having a profound effect on the culture. The rape-apologist backlash – sadly, Will is hardly alone in his ignorance – is in full effect precisely because feminist language and recommendations around sexual assault are being taken seriously by the White House, the media and (hopefully, soon) schools as well. For people like Will – misogynists who believe rape is about "ambiguities" rather than violence – this shift also represents a win for feminists more generally.

Today, if you argue that women who drink or who dared to have past consensual sexual encounters are somehow un-rapeable, you will get taken to task. There's much work to be, for sure – victim-blaming is still much the norm in some circles – but gone are the days when you could say something stupid and sexist and it would go unnoticed or applauded. I'm sure that this change in what's socially acceptable terrifies Will and his cohort because it upends everything they believe about women, sex and consent – and it reveals them for the dinosaurs that they are.

I'm willing to bet that Will has an inbox full of emails from rape survivors (no, no scare quotes necessary) who are educating him on exactly the kind of perks they got if they came forward. I doubt these people's stories will change his mind, but I do know they're changing the country.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...ge-george-will

Egypt asks YouTube to remove video of sexual assault victim
 

(Reuters) - Egypt has asked YouTube to remove a video showing a naked woman with injuries being dragged through Cairo's Tahrir Square after being sexually assaulted during celebrations for President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's inauguration.

Sunday night's assault took place as thousands of people enjoyed inauguration festivities, raising new worries about Egypt's commitment to fighting sexual violence.

Authorities arrested seven men aged between 15 and 49 for sexually harassing women on Tahrir Square after the posting of the video, which caused an uproar in local and international media.

It was not clear whether the men arrested took part in the assault shown on the video.

"The Egyptian embassy in Washington DC and a number of Egyptian authorities, at the direction of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, have requested the YouTube administration to remove the video of the sexual assault victim," Sisi's spokesman said.

"This came in response to her wish, which she expressed during the president's visit to her yesterday at the hospital to check on her condition," he added in an emailed statement late on Thursday.

YouTube was not immediately available for comment on the Egyptian request. The clip showing the assault was still available on the video-sharing website on Friday.

Egypt approved a new law this month which punishes sexual harassment with at least six months in jail or fines of at least 3,000 Egyptian pounds ($420). The United States has urged Egypt to make good on its promises to fight sexual violence.

Sexual assault was rife at demonstrations during and after the 2011 uprising that ousted veteran president Hosni Mubarak and has been common for a decade at large gatherings in Egypt.

Sisi, Egypt's former army chief who won a landslide poll victory last month after deposing elected Islamist president Mohamed Mursi last July, has frequently spoken highly of women and their importance to society.

A police officer who rescued the victim of sexual harassment should be honored, Sisi said, in an apparent reference to the woman in the video.

But some liberals have been wary of Sisi, especially after remarks he made defending an army practice - later denied by an army court - of conducting "virginity tests" on female protesters who complained of abuse.

Sexual harassment, high rates of female genital mutilation and a surge in violence after the Arab Spring uprisings have made Egypt the worst country in the Arab world to be a woman, a Thomson Reuters Foundation survey showed late last year.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...edName=topNews

TRIGGER ALERT
 

Young Girls Say That Sexism Is Part Of Their Daily Lives
 

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/2013...85713807-8.jpg


Girlguiding UK has revealed that sexism affects “most aspects” of the every day lives of young women.

The organisation’s “Equality For Girls” report surveyed more than 1,200 girls and young women aged 7 to 21, and have called their findings “a wake-up call” and “a disturbing insight into the state of equality for girls in the UK.”

The survey revealed that 87% of the 11 to 21-year-olds surveyed said they thought women were judged based on their appearance, and not their abilities.

Disturbingly, most of the 13-year-olds questioned said they had experienced sexual harassment.

Of the entire 13 to 21 age bracket, 28% had experienced unwanted touching and sexual attention, with 26% experiencing unwanted attention and stalking. A further 51% revealed they’d been objected to sexual jokes and taunts, and more than three-quarters said they found this behaviour threatening if they were by themselves.

54% of girls aged 11 to 21 have experienced online abuse.

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/2013...85712233-4.jpg


Young girls are also already worrying about how sexism with affect the career path:

Girls believe that motherhood still disadvantages women in the workplace, and almost half of those aged 11 to 21 worry that having children will negatively affect their career (46%). A similar number think that employers at least to some extent prefer to employ men over women (43%). Half worry about the pay gap between men and women (50%), rising to 60% among 16- to 21-year-olds.

The levels of criticism female celebrities and women in the public eye in the media has also affected young women’s aspirations to be in similar positions one day. 43% say the way women are criticised for how they look on TV has put them off every wanting to be in a position where they’d appear on TV themselves.

66% of 11 to 21-year-olds think they’re aren’t enough women in leadership positions in the UK. However, many of the girls surveyed said that the lack of women in leadership positions made them more determined to succeed.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/catesevilla/...ir-daily-lives

George Will Stands By His Column: 'Indignation is the Default Position of Certain People'
 

George Will is standing by his controversial Washington Post column, in which he stated that universities have turned sexual assault into "a coveted status that confers privileges," arguing that people on the internet just like being upset about things.

As Politico pointed out, during an interview with C-SPAN Friday, Will argued that the backlash has less to do with his argument than with the way the internet works now. "Today, for some reason ... indignation is the default position of certain people in civic discourse," he said. "They go from a standing start to fury in about 30 seconds."

Will went on to say that while it's great that the internet has "erased the barriers of entry to public discourse" he argues that now you don't have to be even remotely intelligent to criticize Washington Post columnists. "Among the barriers of entry that have been reduced, is you don't have to be able to read, write, or think," he said. "You can just come in and shout and call names and carry on."

The reaction to Will's column didn't consist of shouting and name calling so much as people calling for him to be fired. In his Post essay, Will argued against the "preponderance of evidence" standard for adjudicating sexual assault cases that is often used in university investigations (as opposed to the "beyond reasonable doubt" level of a criminal court), but in the process seemingly implied that the sexual assault epidemic isn't real. In fact, as he argued on C-SPAN, it's mainly kids getting in trouble with alcohol. "What's going to result is a lot of young men and young women are going to get in this sea of hormones and alcohol ... you're going to have charges of sexual assault," he said. That combined with the less rigorous legal process on campus means, "you're going to have young men disciplined, their lives often permanently and seriously blighted, don't get into law school, don't get into medical school, all the rest."

Will also responded to the four Senate Democrats who wrote him condemning his column, and claimed that he was more serious about sexual assault — or as he would say "sexual assault" — than Congress, because his definition of sexual assault doesn't include things like "improper touching." As he told CSPAN, "When remarks become sexual assault, improper touching … we begin to blur distinctions that are important to preserve if you believe as the senators purport to believe, that this is a serious matter." And yet, it's hard to imagine how his detractors could trivialize sexual assault more than a man who thinks of increased awareness of sexual assault as an obstacle for future male doctors and lawyers to overcome.




http://www.thewire.com/politics/2014...people/373172/

Paintings of Nigella Lawson being 'throttled' - for sale on Saatchi website
 

“Saatchi Art does not believe in censorship unless the material is pornographic or incites racial hatred." So, it is ok to consider violence against women as art now? And,they will censor racial hatred but not misogyny? WTF.
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Paintings depicting the moment Charles Saatchi apparently throttled his former wife Nigella Lawson have emerged for sale, on his own art website.

The couple divorced last year after Saatchi was seen with his hand around his wife’s neck as they sat outside Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair.

Seven images of the scene are currently for sale via the millionaire art collector’s website, for prices ranging from £150 to several thousand.

They appear on SaatchiArt.com, closely linked to his London gallery and mean the 71-year-old could benefit from any sales.

Mr Saatchi dismissed that ‘throttle’ art could be a new genre, as he said the works were a small proportion of those submitted by 40,000 artists who used the site.

He told the Mail on Sunday: “Would it have been a better story if I had censored artists whose work might be personally disobliging?”

Pete Jones, 52, has listed ‘Last Course’ on the site – a picture of Miss Lawson with hands on her throat painted on a bread board - for £17,600. Another picture, painted by Jane Kelly and called Art Collector Throttling a Cook has a price tag of £1,170.

Darren Udaiyan, 41, produced a Van Gogh style painting of the incident, which he uploaded to the site and is currently on sale for £5,870.

He told the newspaper: "It’s not really controversial. Saatchi is strangling Nigella but it’s also about him squeezing the art market.

"It works on many levels. It’s a comment on the art market and how people control it."

Mr Saatchi accepted a police caution for the incident after a photo was taken of the incident, leading to an acrimonious divorce.

Polly Neate, chief executive of Women’s Aid, said it was “extremely insensitive” to all victims of domestic violence for someone who had accepting a caution for assaulting their partner to earn commission from images of the incident.

Rebecca Wilson, chief curator at the online gallery, said: “Saatchi Art does not believe in censorship unless the material is pornographic or incites racial hatred."

Anyone can upload their work to Saatchi Art, and will received 70 per cent of the sale price with 30 per cent paid to the company for commission.

Pictures came be seen here. ****TriggerWarning****

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/pict...i-website.html

Many girls view sexual assault as normal behavior
 

Many victims of sexual assault do not report these crimes to family, school officials or police, and a new report on the normalization of sexual violence among young girls and women offers several insights into why this is; it also functions as a pretty harrowing primer on rape culture and its consequences.

Researchers at Marquette University analyzed forensic interviews with 100 young people between the ages of 3 and 17, many of whom spoke candidly about their daily experiences of sexual violence and harassment.

According to sociologist Heather Hlavka, many of the young people she interviewed viewed these incidents as a normal part of life. One interview subject told researchers, “They grab you, touch your butt and try to, like, touch you in the front, and run away, but it’s okay, I mean … I never think it’s a big thing because they do it to everyone.”

According to a release on the report, there are several of the reasons why young women do not come forward about the abuse they experience, including a belief that men “can’t help it” and a fear of being labeled a “whore”:


~ Girls believe the myth that men can’t help it. The girls interviewed described men as unable to control their sexual desires, often framing men as the sexual aggressors and women as the gatekeepers of sexual activity. They perceived everyday harassment and abuse as normal male behavior, and as something to endure, ignore, or maneuver around.

~ Many of the girls said that they didn’t report the incident because they didn’t want to make a “big deal” of their experiences. They doubted if anything outside of forcible heterosexual intercourse counted as an offense or rape.

~ Lack of reporting may be linked to trust in authority figures. According to Hlavka, the girls seem to have internalized their position in a male-dominated, sexual context and likely assumed authority figures would also view them as “bad girls” who prompted the assault.

~ Hlavka found that girls don’t support other girls when they report sexual violence. The young women expressed fear that they would be labeled as a “whore” or “slut,” or accused of exaggeration or lying by both authority figures and their peers, decreasing their likelihood of reporting sexual abuse.

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/14/repo...ampaign=buffer

Home> U.S. First Woman Charged on Controversial Law that Criminalizes Drug Use During Pregnancy
 

A Tennessee woman is the first to be charged under a new state law that specifically makes it a crime to take drugs while pregnant, calling it "assault."

Mallory Loyola, 26, was arrested this week after both she and her newborn infant tested positive for meth, according to ABC News affiliate WATE-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee. Loyola is the first person in the state to prosecuted for the offense.

The law, which just went into effect earlier this month, allows a woman to be "prosecuted for assault for the illegal use of a narcotic drug while pregnant" if her infant is harmed or addicted to the drug.

Monroe County Sheriff Bill Bivens told WATE-TV that the 26-year-old admitted to smoking meth days before giving birth.

"Anytime someone is addicted and they can't get off for their own child, their own flesh and blood, it's sad," he said.

Bivens said he hoped the arrest would deter other pregnant women from drug use.

"Hopefully it will send a signal to other women who are pregnant and have a drug problem to seek help. That's what we want them to do," he said.

The law has come under tremendous opposition from both state and national critics, who say that the law will hinder drug-addicted pregnant women from getting help and treatment.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee is actively seeking to challenge the law, which they describe as raising "serious constitutional concerns regarding equal treatment under the law."

"This dangerous law unconstitutionally singles out new mothers struggling with addiction for criminal assault charges," Thomas Castelli, legal director of the ACLU Tennessee, said in a statement. "By focusing on punishing women rather than promoting healthy pregnancies, the state is only deterring women struggling with alcohol or drug dependency from seeking the pre-natal care they need."

Just before Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam signed the bill in April, Michael Botticelli, acting director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy at the time, said the federal government didn't want to "criminalize" addiction.

"What's important is that we create environments where we're really diminishing the stigma and the barriers, particularly for pregnant women, who often have a lot of shame and guilt about their substance abuse disorders," Botticelli said, according to The Nashville Tennessean. "We know that it's usually a much more effective treatment and less costly to our taxpayers if we make sure that we're treating folks."

Haslam released a statement after signing the bill saying the intent of the law is to "give law enforcement and district attorneys a tool to address illicit drug use among pregnant women through treatment programs."

Loyola was released on $2,000 bail and was charged with a misdemeanor according to WATE-TV. The law allows anyone charged to use entering a treatment program before birth and successfully completing it afterwards as a defense.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/woman-charg...ry?id=24542754

The Next Hobby Lobby: Get Ready to Hear So Much More About Birth Control Mandates
 

Eden Foods is an organic food business that's been operating out of Michigan since the 1960s. Eden's president and sole shareholder, Michael Potter, is anti-GMO, pro-macrobiotic diet, and believes in "full transparency–complete disclosure of ingredients and all handling" for Eden's products, which include things like mung beans, buckwheat noodles, plum vinegar, and dried sea vegetables. As a longtime Eden Foods consumer, I don't think it's unfair to describe the company as exactly what conservatives would dream up if they were parodying an organic foods brand.

Well, except for one thing: Potter is a Roman Catholic who says certain forms of birth control are abortion. And his lawsuit challenging the Health and Human Services (HHS) contraception mandate is one of three that the U.S. Supreme Court has ordered to be reviewed in wake of its June 30 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the controversial case concerning birth control and an employer's responsibility to provide health insurance that covers it. The Christian owners of corporate craft chain Hobby Lobby had said doing so violated their religious beliefs and the Supreme Court agreed, holding that requiring a closely-held company to provide the coverage was not "the least restrictive means" of accomplishing the government's goal (increasing insurance coverage for contraception) and therefore stood in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993.

Following the Hobby Lobby ruling, the Court ordered reviews of three similar cases wherein lower courts had rejected companies' requests to be exempted from the mandate: Autocam Corp. v. Burwell, Eden Foods v. Burwell, and Gilardi v. Department of Health & Human Services.

Autocam is a Michigan-based company that manufactures parts for cars and medical supplies. The Gilardi brothers operate two Ohio food distribution companies. In all three lawsuits, the companies objected to covering all forms of contraception (in the Hobby Lobby case, owners had merely objected to four specific types). The Gilardi case will now go back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia; Eden and Autocam will bounce back to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Of course, these three case are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. More than four dozen lawsuits against the Obamacare contraception mandate are pending by faith-affiliated charities, colleges, and hospitals, according to the Associated Press. And 49 lawsuits—many of them stayed in anticipation of the Hobby Lobby ruling—are pending from for-profit corporations. See a list of them here.

In October, when the U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term, it is expected to hear a challenge from the University of Notre Dame—a challenge very similar to one from Christian college Wheaton. Unlike Hobby Lobby, Wheaton was eligible for the accommodation for religious nonprofits that HHS had already worked out. Under this workaround, religious employers who object to covering contraception must simply alert the government of their objection and which insurance company they use. Thereafter, the government will make arrangements with insurers to provide birth control coverage for the company's employees (a move which insurance companies seem to have accepted because plans that include contraception coverage wind up less costly to them those that don't).

But Wheaton says that merely filling out the form violates religious beliefs, since doing so would indirectly end up facilitating birth control coverage for employees. Last week, the Supreme Court granted the college an injunction against enforcement of the contraception mandate pending appeal.

The Court's decision in Wheaton doesn't resolve the merit of the school's claims (though for a clickbait-y mess of legal ignorance, check out this Dahlia Lithwick and Sonja West piece asserting that the court found the whole accommodation "unconstitutional"). Should Wheaton get its way, those who oppose the contraception mandate may be "close to the end of the line of what they can demand" under the RFRA, notes Jonathan H. Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy:

Wheaton and some religious employers claim that the form HHS requires them to fill out and sign (EBSA Form 700) substantially burdens their religious belief because it directly facilitates the provision of contraceptive coverage to which they object. Yet as the order notes, religious objectors are able to notify the government of their objections to contraception coverage without using the form, and that nothing in RFRA would prevent the government from using this information to facilitate contraception coverage for relevant employees. This would suggest that should a majority of the Court find the existing accommodation insufficient, a RFRA-compliant accommodation based on a different form or reporting procedure should be relatively easy to create.

Yes, some religious objectors might object to any form, but an objection to informing the government of one’s objection, due to the knowledge that the government may use this information in an objectionable fashion, would seem to fail for the same reasons that religious objections to paying taxes fail.

A small tweak to the existing religious nonprofit accommodation seems harmless enough, but there are reasons some supporters of the Hobby Lobby decision may object to the court coming down in full favor of Wheaton College. Michael Austin at IVN news likens it to the difference between exceptions and accommodations in education:

Accommodations include such things as providing sign-language interpreters, note takers, recorded textbooks, and extra time on tests. The guiding philosophy behind educational accommodations is that every student should have an equal opportunity to learn the material in a course and have that knowledge assessed by an instructor.

From time to time, educators are asked to forgo that philosophy and make exceptions for students who are having difficulty in a course—to require less reading, or fewer tests, or lower grades for some students than for others. Exceptions often look like accommodations, but they are actually very much the opposite.

Austin thinks Hobby Lobby was looking for an accommodation, while Wheaton (and Notre Dame and the dozens of institutions involved in similar cases) is looking for an exception. "It will be tempting for the courts, and for Americans generally, to believe that religious exceptions proceed logically from religious accommodations," he writes. "But they do not. Accommodations and exceptions are fundamentally different kinds of things. One allows us to balance competing interests, while the other demands that we sacrifice one set of interests to another."

Under the RFRA, it really comes down to substantial burden—does it substantially burden a nonprofit's religious freedom to fill out a form objecting to covering birth control? I would say no. Though neither would it burden HHS substantially to change the reporting requirement in some way (say, by having employees at objecting companies fill out a form).

But all this implies we're actually arguing about what we say we're arguing about, and by this point it's clear we are most certainly not, at least not unilaterally. Both the federal government and some employers are using the contraception bit of HHS' essential benefits mandate as a way to protest or defend Obamacare, and what it stands for, at large.

One person who isn't afraid to admit this is Eden Foods' Potter. Though Potter's lawsuit against HHS is brought on First Amendment and RFRA violation grounds, Potter barely mentions his religious beliefs when he talks or writes about the case. In 2013, he told Salon's Irin Carmon that he didn't care about birth control per se but the "whole category of things that I don’t think any company should be forced to be involved with." In a press release the same month, Potter called it "discriminatory" that not all employers have to comply with the HHS mandate ("individuals who practice certain faiths are exempt, while individuals who practice other faiths are not") and lamented the "overreach" of HHS:

Eden employee benefits include health, dental, vision, life, and a fifty percent 401k match. The benefits have not funded "lifestyle drugs," an insurance industry drug classification that includes contraceptives, Viagra, smoking cessation, weight-loss, infertility, impotency, etc. This entire plan is managed with a goal of long-term sustainability.

We believe in a woman's right to decide, and have access to, all aspects of their health care and reproductive management. This lawsuit does not block, or intend to block, anyone's access to health care or reproductive management. This lawsuit is about protecting religious freedom and stopping the government from forcing citizens to violate their conscience. We object to the HHS mandate and its government overreach.

After the Supreme Court ordered Eden's case to be reviewed, Potter put out a short press release affirming that "we believe we did what we should have." Many progressives are now calling for a boycott of Eden Foods. Carmon and others have suggested that the real root of Potter's distaste for "lifestyle drugs" like contraception is not religion but his macrobiotic diet and beliefs.

But should that even matter? Deeply held beliefs are deeply held beliefs. Why is it okay to object to medications because of Jesus but not because of your construction of health and science? If both get you to the same place—a moral conviction against certain healthcare—than why should one be any more valid than the other as a talisman against government overreach?

"No one has a natural right to force other people to pay for her (or his) contraception or anything else (with or without the government's help), and by logical extension, everyone has a right to refuse to pay if asked," Sheldon Richman wrote recently.

Of course, the only legally available way to refuse to pay (at least without getting hit by steep fines) is by claiming a religious exemption, so that's what we're getting at the moment. However—as Jacob Sullum has noted here many times, and I tried to convey in this recent interview with Catholic magazine America—allowing for religious exemptions to generally applicable law can lead to a general questioning or rethinking of those laws.

In any event, Hobby Lobby was only the beginning on contraception coverage front. We can expect to see a lot of similar cases coming before federal courts in the months and perhaps years to come. We can expect legislative action, too: The Obama administration is insisting that it will act to remedy the Court's Hobby Lobby decision. And Democratic Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn signed a law Sunday that will give voters the chance to enact a state law forcing business owners to offer prescription birth control coverage to employees.

But this is a controversy that only exists because the Obama administration and Congress have made birth control, and all sorts of health services, an appropriate subject of state and corporate concern. More laws trying to compel business owners to run their companies in a certain way isn't going to get us anywhere but more court battles.

"Accommodations support, while exceptions destroy, the integrity of the enterprise that creates them," Austin wrote about the Wheaton case. Perhaps that's actually a feature in this situation.

http://reason.com/archives/2014/07/0...-control-cases

Judge to be Censored Over Rape Comments

HELENA, Mont. (AP) - The Montana Supreme Court on Tuesday will publicly reprimand a judge who gave a lenient sentence to a rapist after suggesting the 14-year-old victim shared some of the responsibility for the crime.

District Judge G. Todd Baugh, of Billings, is scheduled to appear before the court in Helena, where one of the justices will read a censure statement prepared in advance. Baugh will likely get an opportunity to address the court, and the censure will then go into the record, state Supreme Court clerk Ed Smith said Monday.

The censure is a public declaration by the high court that a judge is guilty of misconduct. The rarely used punishment was recommended by the state's Judicial Standards Commission, which investigated complaints into the comments Baugh made during Stacey Dean Rambold's sentencing last year.

"It's a process basically to publicly reprimand them for their conduct bringing dishonor on their position and the court's judicial system," Smith said.

The standards commission can impose or recommend to the Supreme Court a range of disciplinary actions if it finds merit in a misconduct complaint filed against a judge. They range from a private letter of admonishment to removal from office.

The Supreme Court accepted the commission's recommendation for Baugh's censure, but also added a 31-day suspension. Chief Justice Mike McGrath wrote in the order that Baugh had eroded confidence in the court system.

Baugh sent Rambold to prison for 30 days last year after he pleaded guilty to sexual intercourse without consent.

Rambold was a 47-year-old business teacher at Billings Senior High School at the time of the 2007 rape. The victim was one of his students. She committed suicide while the case was pending trial.

Baugh said during Rambold's sentencing in August that the teenager was "probably as much in control of the situation as the defendant" and that she "appeared older than her chronological age."

Under state law, children younger than 16 cannot consent to sexual intercourse.

After a public outcry, Baugh apologized for the comments and acknowledged the short prison sentence violated state law. He attempted to revise it retroactively but was blocked when the state filed its appeal.

The last Montana judge was censured by the Supreme Court was District Judge Jeffrey Langton, of Hamilton, in 2005. Langton had pleaded guilty to a drunken driving charge, then was placed on probation for violating the terms of his sentence.

Rambold has been free since last fall after serving the original sentence. After his release, Rambold registered as a sex offender and was to remain on probation through 2028.

Prosecutors appealed Baugh's sentence, and the Supreme Court in April ordered a new sentencing in the case by a different judge. District Judge Randal Spaulding, of Roundup, is scheduled to re-sentence Rambold on Sept. 26.

Baugh, who is the son of former Washington Redskins quarterback "Slingin'" Sammy Baugh, has said he plans to retire after three decades on the bench when his term expires in December.

What the CDC's Sexual Violence Report Tells Us About Women and Assault
 

Nearly one in five women have been raped, according to a new report on sexual victimization from the Center for Disease Control. The data tracks the responses of 12, 727 men and women over the age of 18, based on their experiences during and through 2011. The report's findings — particularly how prevalent rape is, and the fact that most rapists aren't strangers — shouldn't be surprising, but there's a difference between knowing facts dispel certain myths and seeing the numbers laid out.

Report

7 Famous Quotes You Definitely Didn't Know Were From Women
 

“Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” said Thomas Edison.

The quote immaculately and succinctly captures the ingredients to success, and appears to be – at least to those who still believe he invented the light bulb – classic Edison: genius.

Except for one minor detail.

Edison never actually wrote or said those words. What’s more – experts now say that that a woman you’ve never heard of should get the credit.

And she’s not the only one, though we’ll never know all their names.

How Edison’s quote evolved hints at a tendency of prevailing culture to put words in the mouths of famous men – in a way that amplifies their greatness. A “courtesy” perhaps, that has never quite been extended in much the same way to women, many remaining largely unknown or forgotten.

So how did seven famously inspiring quotes come to be attributed to Edison and the likes of Emerson, Twain, Voltaire, Vonnegut and Kafka when these were originally conceived, or written by, women?

1. “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

Attributed to: Thomas Edison

Credit due to: Kate Sanborn

In the early 1890’s an academic named Kate Sanborn delivered a series of lectures on the topic “What is Genius?” She defined genius as a mix of “inspiration” and “perspiration”. “Talent is perspiration,” she said, explaining that genius required more perspiration than inspiration. If she provided a ratio, it was never recorded.

Sanborn was ridiculed in a newspaper editorial column that said she was “getting a lot of attention” for stating something so obvious.

Nevertheless, her definition may have found its way into the consciousness of a famous and influential contemporary: Thomas Edison.

Edison, later asked for his definition of genius is said to have answered, “2% is genius and 98% is hard work.”

When probed on whether genius was inspired, he replied, “Bah! Genius is not inspired. Inspiration is perspiration.”

Within a month of Edison’s comments being published, several writers and speakers re-jigged his statements – and after clever re-writes (without his further input), this eventually culminated in the quote as we now know it.

Edison may have provided a ratio, but who deserves the credit?

“In my opinion Kate Sanborn’s lectures were very important in the evolution and construction of the quotation that is now popularly attributed to Thomas Edison,” writes “Garson O’Toole” in an email to me.

He’s the Quote Investigator (QI) – a Magnum P.I for the quote world if you will, that is, if Magnum also had a PhD.

I also checked in with Fred Shapiro, the renowned expert and editor of the Yale Book Of Quotations - considered the most authoritative and complete quotation book in the world.

Shapiro also happened to write “Anonymous Was a Woman” – a piece published several years ago in Yale’s Alumni Magazine.

“If I was writing my ‘Anonymous Was a Woman’ article now,” he tells me, “I would include Sanborn and Edison as another example of a woman not being given credit for a famous saying.”

Coming from a quotes legend like Shapiro, that’s all the confirmation needed: Kate Sanborn was a precursor of Edison’s famous quote and deserves major points.

Then again, this game called life isn’t really about keeping scores against others, is it?

2. “Sometimes you’re ahead; sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.”

Misattributed to: Kurt Vonnegut / Baz Luhrmann

Credit due to: Mary Schmich

Wise words indeed from Mary Schmich, often misattributed to Kurt Vonnegut or even Baz Luhrmann (via 1998’s Sunscreen Song).

Schmich, a journalist, had written a column for the Chicago Times about what she’d say to the class of ’97 if she were to be asked to give a commencement speech.

If the quote seems unfamiliar, her opening line to that column is sure to jog the memory of any kid from the 90’s:

“Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97: Wear sunscreen.”

The essay became the subject of a fake e-mail chain claiming to be a MIT commencement address given by counterculture hero Vonnegut.

The e-mail went viral and the association with Vonnegut became so widespread that his lawyer was flooded with requests to reprint, prompting Vonnegut to reply: “What [Schmich] wrote was funny, wise and charming, so I would have been proud had the words been mine.”

“Poor man,” responded Schmich. “He didn’t deserve to have his reputation sullied in this way.”

So it goes.

Schmich went on to win a Pulitzer in 2012 – the ultimate symbol of success for a journalist. But, success doesn’t always necessarily mean winning. Consider this still-refreshing definition:

3. “To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

Misattributed to: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Credit due to: Bessie Anderson Stanley

In 1904 a Boston firm, in conjunction with a woman’s magazine, ran a competition in which people were asked to answer the question “What Constitutes Success?” in 100 words or less.

The winner was a woman from Kansas named Bessie A. Stanley. Her submission, presented in its entirety below, earned her the prize money of $250.

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much;

Who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children;

Who has filled his niche and accomplished his task;

Who has never lacked appreciation of Earth’s beauty or failed to express it;

Who has left the world better than he found it,

Whether an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul;

Who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had;

Whose life was an inspiration;

Whose memory a benediction.

Sound familiar?

In 1951, in a piece titled “What Is Success?” a writer quoted the words he claimed to be from Ralph Waldo Emerson (the quote at the start of #3.)

According to QI, what the writer presented as an Emerson quote was “clearly derived” from Stanley’s essay.

However, the attribution to Emerson stuck (the writer’s column was syndicated) and the quote firmly entered popular culture when Ann Landers featured it in her famous column in 1966 and then again in 1980.

4. “Don’t bend; don’t water it down, don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

Misattributed to: Franz Kafka

Credit due to: Anne Rice

In 1995, a collection of short stories by Kafka was published, including a foreword by the author Anne Rice. Here’s an excerpt:

Kafka became a model for me, a continuing inspiration. Not only did he exhibit an irrepressible originality—who else would think of things like this!—he seemed to say that only in one’s most personal language can the crucial tales of a writer be told. Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Only if you do that can you hope to make the reader feel a particle of what you, the writer, have known and feel compelled to share.

According to QI, Anne Rice did not use quotation marks in the passage above because she was not quoting Kafka. “She was presenting her conjectural thoughts about Kafka’s attitude toward writing.”

Proving this one is a slam dunk: Anne Rice deserves full attribution for her quote.

Memo To Russell Brand: You may want to correct the misattribution in your Booky Wook.

5. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Misattributed to: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Credit due to: Muriel Strode

In August 1903, Muriel Strode published a poem titled “Wind-Wafted Wild Flowers.”

Here’s the relevant excerpt:

“I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail.”

In 1992, an academic periodical printed Strode’s slightly revised quote (replacing just the I’s) with an attribution to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Not long after, it appeared as a sign at a school once again incorrectly credited – and from there you could say it took off, becoming widely accepted by the general public as an Emerson quote.

“It is clear that the linkage of the saying to Ralph Waldo Emerson occurred many years after his death and is not substantive,” concludes QI.

In terms of misquotes Emerson ranks up there with another great writer – Mark Twain.

6. “The secret to getting ahead is getting started.”

Misattributed to: Mark Twain

Credit due to: Agatha Christie

According to Cindy Lovell, Executive Director of the Mark Twain House and Museum, this is not a Mark Twain quote. Several other Twain experts agree. “Mark Twain remains the most frequently quoted American author,” Lovell writes, “which means he is also the most frequently misquoted author.”

Here comes the plot twist.

In a surprising email to me, Agatha Christie Limited (a private company set up by Agatha Christie prior to her death) confirms that this is indeed one of hers. They say the quote originated during an old press interview – but are unable to locate the source.

John Curran, an expert on Agatha Christie with whom I share this bit of news, tells me he shall “remain dubious” until he sees the original citation.

With Twain definitively out of the running for this quote though, and unless it can be proven otherwise, Agatha Christie deserves at least a tentative full-credit for now.

7. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Misattributed to: Voltaire

Credit due to: Evelyn Beatrice Hall

In her 1907 book Friends of Voltaire, Hall wrote:

Voltaire forgave him all injuries, intentional or unintentional. ‘What a fuss about an omelette!’ he had exclaimed when he heard of the burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ was his attitude now.

With the quote marks, it easy to see how the words eventually came to be attributed to Voltaire. But, Hall was not actually quoting Voltaire – she was describing his attitude.

In 1934, the quote entered popular culture when it was misattributed to Voltaire in the “Quotable Quotes” section of the Readers Digest.

Later, in an interview with a newspaper, Hall tried to correct the misattribution. “I did not mean to imply that Voltaire used these words verbatim and should be surprised if they are found in any of his works. They are rather a paraphrase of Voltaire’s words in the Essay on Tolerance — ‘Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.’”

Still though, decades later, the quote still seems to stick to Voltaire.

So, what’s the big deal if quotes are misattributed or not attributed at all? If some of these women were around now, would they really have minded at all?

It might have mattered.

In this day and age, an uncredited quote could amount to millions of dollars in lost royalties – well, at least to Vivian Greene.

You may know her as she is more commonly known – Anonymous.

Greene has been struggling for years to get credit for her work.

Even copyrighted, her quotes still appear unattributed on various products sold in household-name stores around the world – denying her not just recognition, but a substantial amount of income from royalties.

Despite this, and several other setbacks she’s faced along the way, she still maintains a tremendously positive spirit.

You could say she’s figured out one of life’s secrets:

“Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass … it’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

After all, she came up with that quote back in the 70’s.

Let’s give this woman, at least, credit in her time.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/maseenaz...piring-quotes/