Misogyny and Sexism in the News

[Allison W]

I've been putting this one off, but I think there's sufficient mass for another update on what GG has been up to.

First off, on entities (and men) in tech condemning Gamergate, Blizzard's CEO, Michael Morhaime, did so at the start of Blizzcon on November 7. It was fairly gentle as condemnations go, but still. For some further context on Blizzard: Blizzard is the company behind World of Warcraft, whose playerbase is now like 60% women, because Blizzard actually punishes harassment on WoW servers. Because they were smart and realised that letting dudebros drive women away was leaving money on the table. (And that's what Gamergate is angry about: women's money is green and game developers are starting to look for ways to get women to buy their products. Which involves putting the interests of women ahead of the interests of toxic little boys who want to keep "cooties" out of what they mistakenly believe to be their treehouse.)

Some more good news: one of Gamergate's early successes, such as they were, that wasn't harassing women out of vidya was getting companies like Intel to stop advertising on sites they don't like. Like getting Intel to stop advertising on Gamasutra. So what's the good news? Intel reversed its decision and is advertising on Gamasutra again. So not only is Gamergate stalling out, but it's actively losing ground it once held.

Video game critic and cultural commentator Jim Sterling of the Jimquisition left The Escapist (an online entertainment magazine, mostly about video gaming) to go independent. I don't think he actually declared a specific reason aside from getting enough support on his Patreon to be able to safely go independent, but I wonder how much of it has to do with the fact that Alexander Marcis, general manager of the Escapist, gave preferential coverage to Gamergate by actually getting his sources for an article on Gamergate from 4chan. The writers Alexander Marcis invited to comment included Slade Villena, a guy who previously had actively advocated for "black hat" (criminal) tactics against Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, and James Desborough, whose Gor RPG (about a massively misogynistic setting in which women are sex slaves, I wish I were making this up) Alexander Marcis was financially backing at the time (I actually saw that kickstarter and promptly donated all of my NOPE). Because it was never about ethics in gaming journalism. Jim Sterling, on the other hand, has ended up on the anti-GG side by virtue of people accusing him of being a "social justice warrior" because he's stated that better representation of women and minorities in video games is both morally and financially the correct course of action. (His response to this accusation was to ask if he's allowed to be a social justice bard. Thank God for him.)

Now for some half-assed "bad news" that doesn't actually seem to mean anything positive for Gamergate:

Gamergate lost Milo, but it picked up a new sad excuse for a champion, who, as David Futrelle says, looks like a wax replica of Patrick Bateman and thinks gamers are a bunch of dateless nerds (and Gamergaters don't seem to be disagreeing with him very hard on this point).

Roosh V (who one of my friends nicknamed LR1, for "Literally Rapist 1") started a "gaming site" for Gamergaters called Reaxxion (presumably a reference to "neoreactionary"). Of course, he openly declares that his stake in this is 'protecting the interests of heterosexual Western males,' but that gay men and 'attractive women' are still allowed. One of the first articles up on the site ended with the note that in further columns it would explore how video games are a fundamentally male activity. I'm not even kidding. I wish I were.

Remember that thing with Matt Taylor's shirt covered in half-naked ladies? Gamergate is jumping on that because the #Gamergate hashtag is losing steam, and of course they're talking about how this is the exact thing they've been fighting all along. (Because it was never about ethics in gaming journalism.)

The guys making The Sarkeesian Effect, who are, of course, Gamergaters, decided to bring on Jack Fucking Thompson as a source. I'm old enough to remember when Jack Thompson was actually trying to destroy video games, and so I always found the comparisons of Anita Sarkeesian to Jack Thompson to be ridiculous and disingenuous. But now, Gamergate has passed comparing Anita Sarkeesian to Jack Thompson and actually progressed to inviting Jack Thompson--who not only actually did seek to destroy video games, but also got disbarred for severe ethics violations--in to call Anita Sarkeesian a "censor." (Because it was always about attacking feminism, and not about ethics of any kind, or even really about video games, particularly for the open misogynists behind The Sarkeesian Effect.)

Now, this next one is a fair bit heavier--trigger warning, definitely a trigger warning for this link. Remember how I mentioned in an earlier post that /r/KotakuInAction actually had to drop several moderators from its board for their extremely inconvenient connections, like that one moderator they happened to share with /r/PhilosophyOfRape? I didn't go into more detail on that board at the time, but if you actually want the messy details, here they are, from The Mary Sue. Again, TRIGGER WARNING.

Here, wash that out of your brain. Have a nice picture of Vivian James being liberated from being Gamergate's mascot and getting some good pro-woman games and even a new hoodie so she doesn't have to wear a dogwhistle rape joke.

Now. Lastly, some shitlord told Brianna Wu that "respects is earn." You know, that thing where dudebros claim that it's OK to disrespect women because women haven't "earned respect" but men supposedly have. The way this guy butchered the phrase, however, invited a delightful new meme. Enjoy!

PS: on women in STEM fields, and computer science and vidya specifically, god dammit Mattel

[Gemme]

UVa Fraternity Suspended Over Rape Allegations

Also, this struck a chord with me.

#FeministHackerBarbie

smh

[Soon]

Originally Posted by Gemme

UVa Fraternity Suspended Over Rape Allegations

Here's the Rolling Stone in-depth article on that.

[Kobi]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court is weighing the free-speech rights of people who use violent or threatening language on Facebook and other social media.

The justices will hear arguments Monday in the case of a man who was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for posting graphically violent rap lyrics on Facebook about killing his estranged wife, shooting up a kindergarten class and attacking an FBI agent.

Anthony Elonis of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, says he was just venting his anger over a broken marriage and never meant to threaten anyone.

But his wife didn't see it that way, and neither did federal prosecutors. A jury convicted Elonis of violating a federal law that makes it a crime to threaten another person. A federal appeals court rejected his claim that his comments were protected by the First Amendment.

Lawyers for Elonis argue that the government must prove he actually intended his comments to threaten others. The government says it doesn't matter what Elonis intended; the true test of a threat is whether his words make a reasonable person feel threatened.

One post about his wife said, "There's one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you. I'm not going to rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts."

The case has drawn widespread attention from free-speech advocates who say comments on Facebook, Twitter and other social media can be hasty, impulsive and easily misinterpreted. They point out that a message on Facebook intended for a small group could be taken out of context when viewed by a wider audience.

"A statute that proscribes speech without regard to the speaker's intended meaning runs the risk of punishing protected First Amendment expression simply because it is crudely or zealously expressed," said a brief from the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups.

So far, most lower courts have rejected that view, ruling that a "true threat" depends on how an objective person perceives the message.

For more than four decades, the Supreme Court has said that "true threats" to harm another person are not protected speech under the First Amendment. But the court has been careful to distinguish threats from protected speech such as "political hyperbole" or "unpleasantly sharp attacks."

Elonis argues that his online posts under the pseudonym "Tone Dougie" were simply a crude and spontaneous form of expression that should not be considered threatening if he didn't really mean it. His lawyers say the posts were heavily influenced by rap star Eminem, who has also fantasized in songs about killing his ex-wife.

But Elonis' wife testified that the comments made her fear for her life.

After his wife obtained a protective order against him, Elonis wrote a lengthy post mocking court proceedings: "Did you know that it's illegal for me to say I want to kill my wife?"

A female FBI agent later visited Elonis at home to ask him about the postings. Elonis took to Facebook again: "Little agent lady stood so close, took all the strength I had not to turn the bitch ghost. Pull my knife, flick my wrist and slit her throat."

The Obama administration says requiring proof that a speaker intended to be threatening would undermine the law's protective purpose. In its brief to the court, the Justice Department argues that no matter what someone believes about his comments, it doesn't lessen the fear and anxiety they might cause for other people.

The case is Elonis v. United States, 13-983.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT

[Kobi]

[Kobi]

WASHINGTON — Peggy Young used to drive for United Parcel Service, delivering envelopes and small packages early in the morning. “I was a dependable, honorable worker,” she said. “I worked when I was supposed to. I did what I was supposed to.”

Then she got pregnant, and her doctor recommended that she avoid lifting anything heavy. The company responded by placing her on unpaid leave.

“I lost my health benefits,” Ms. Young said. “I lost my pension. And I lost my wages for seven months. And my disability benefits.”

She sued under the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and the Supreme Court will hear her case on Wednesday. Women’s rights groups hope that Ms. Young’s case will snap their recent losing streak at the court, which has included decisions on equal pay, medical leave, abortion and contraception.

“We’ve had some very big disappointments recently, but I’m hoping it won’t be a uniform set of experiences,” said Marcia D. Greenberger, a co-president of the National Women’s Law Center. “I hope Peggy Young will break the mold.”

The Supreme Court’s decision has the potential to affect the lives of millions of women, who make up 47 percent of the labor force and often work during and late into their pregnancies. According to the Census Bureau, an estimated 62 percent of women who had given birth in the previous year were in the labor force.

Women are the sole or primary breadwinners in 40 percent of American families with children, according to a Pew Research Center study. Whether employers are required to make accommodations for their pregnancies, women’s groups say, will make a tangible difference in the lives of many families.

UPS has announced that it will change its policy to offer light duty to pregnant women starting in January. “The new policy will strengthen UPS’s commitment to treating all workers fairly and supporting women in the workplace,” said Kara Ross, a spokeswoman for the company.

The case before the Supreme Court, she said, “is really about what the UPS policy was then.” The old policy, she said, “was lawful and consistently applied to our workers.”

The company told the justices that it had no legal obligation to make the kinds of accommodations it recently announced. The lower courts in Ms. Young’s case agreed, with a unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., saying the pregnancy law does not give pregnant women “a ‘most favored nation’ status.”

“One may characterize the UPS policy as insufficiently charitable,” Judge Allyson Kay Duncan wrote for the court, “but a lack of charity does not amount to discriminatory animus directed at a protected class of employees.”

Ms. Young, speaking in a public relations firm’s conference room here, said it would have been easy for UPS to accommodate her.

The parcels she delivered were so light that the lifting restriction recommended by her doctor was needless. “It’s envelopes or very small boxes,” she said. “They sat in a little basket in a seat next to me. Very rarely was it anything heavy, because it’s very expensive to send that way.”
Continue reading the main story

If something heavy did turn up for an early morning delivery, a co-worker could handle it, Ms. Young said. If the company remained concerned, she said, it could have assigned her less demanding duties.

She said she had worked a second job in the afternoons throughout her pregnancy, delivering flowers. “They were heavier than the packages I would deliver for UPS,” Ms. Young said.

Business groups have filed briefs supporting UPS, saying the pregnancy law did not apply to Ms. Young’s situation. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce noted that many of its members had nonetheless “decided — for a variety of reasons — to offer pregnant employees more than what federal law compels them to provide.”

Ms. Young has attracted a diverse array of supporters, including women’s rights organizations and anti-abortion groups. The federal law, the anti-abortion groups told the justices, “protects the unborn child as well as the working mother who faces economic and other difficulties in bearing and raising the child.”

The Obama administration also supports Ms. Young, a stance that has required it to renounce statements in earlier briefs. The administration’s latest brief included a footnote acknowledging that the federal government “has previously taken the position that pregnant employees with work limitations are not similarly situated to employees with similar limitations caused by on-the-job injuries.”

“That is no longer the position of the United States,” the brief said, though it added that the United States Postal Service “continues to offer different treatment” to its pregnant workers.

The pregnancy law, she noted, was enacted in response to the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in General Electric Co. v. Gilbert, which ruled that discrimination based on pregnancy was not a form of sex discrimination. That congressional reaction, she said, was similar to one that followed the court’s decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., the 2007 ruling that said Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 imposed strict time limits for bringing workplace discrimination suits. In response, Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.

As for Ms. Young, Justice Ginsburg said, “this was a woman whose doctor told her she couldn’t lift more than, I think, 20 pounds.”

“For people who were temporarily disabled,” she added, “the employer would make an accommodation, but the employer said, ‘We’re not making an accommodation for her because she’s not disabled.’ ”

The case, Young v. United Parcel Service, No. 12-1226, turns on the language of the pregnancy law. It requires employers to treat “women affected by pregnancy” the same as “other persons not so affected but similar in their ability or inability to work.”

There is no dispute that some UPS workers were offered accommodations. What the two sides disagree about is whether the law required Ms. Young to be treated the same way.

The company made accommodations for workers who were injured on the job, who were covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act and who lost their driving certification from the Department of Transportation.

“They even accommodated people who lost their regular driver’s licenses due to drunk-driving convictions,” said Sharon Fast Gustafson, one of Ms. Young’s lawyers. “They would give them a separate driver to drive the truck while they were delivering packages.”

The company countered that it had treated Ms. Young the same as “other employees with similar lifting restrictions resulting from an off-the-job injury or condition.”

That is slicing things too finely, said Samuel Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan who will argue in the Supreme Court on behalf of Ms. Young. “What went wrong here,” he said, “is that UPS did not treat Peggy Young as it did any other valued employee.”

Ms. Young, 42, left UPS in 2009 and now works for a government contractor. She has three children, and she said she would be thinking about them when the Supreme Court heard her case.

“I don’t want my daughters to have to choose,” Ms. Young said, “between having a baby and supporting a family.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/01/us...pgtype=article

[Gemme]

Sailor Filmed and Distributed Videos of Women on Submarine

[Kobi]

You wouldn't think that folks dressing up in Sailor Moon costumes would strike fear into grown adults. And yet, for many in the comics industry, cosplay—“costume play”— seems to produce unusual levels of anxiety and bile. The most recent individual to publicly shout at the X-Men to get off his lawn is artist Patrick Broderick, who wrote on Facebook:

If you're a Cosplay personality, please don't send me a friend request. If you're a convention promoter and you're building your show around cosplay events and mega multiple media guest don't invite me....You bring nothing of value to the shows, and if you're a promoter pushing cosplay as your main attraction you're not helping the industry or comics market..Thank you.

Writer Mark Ellis then suggested that cosplayers had "narcissistic personality disorder" and took a brave stand against "overweight women in Power Girl and Slave Girl Leia costumes posing, posturing and demanding $20 to take a photo of them. A guy I know just said, ‘You’re standing around in public looking like a fool…shove your $20’ and took pictures anyway."

The dynamic here is clear enough. As Sam Maggs writes at The Mary Sue, the superhero comic world has long tilted overwhelmingly towards guys. That's changing though—and cosplay is both a result and a cause. Cosplay combines comics with the stereotypically feminized world of fashion; it's a way for folks to combine a love of Batman or Thor with a love of fabric and sewing and dressing up. As Maggs says, "Cosplay is an industry largely dominated by women; it opens up the world of comics—a world which has overwhelmingly felt exclusionary to girls and women—in a whole new way."

The question is, why do folks like Broderick and Ellis find that threatening? How exactly does someone cosplaying Power-Girl next to your booth damage you? People sometimes make vague claims about loss of revenue, or that the cosplayers don't buy enough comics—though it's hard to figure how more people at a convention filing past your table is going to damage your bottom line. The real vitriol, in any case, as in Ellis's statement, seems to be directed at the sexuality of cosplay, and even more at its artificiality. It’s the same mentality behind the fake geek girl meme—the idea that women cosplayers aren't real fans, and, beyond that, aren't actually real people. As Julia Serano argues in her 2007 book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, the feminine is often denigrated as artificial and sexualized. The cosplayers threaten to undermine the authentic purity and virtue of the comics industry. A woman is getting her picture taken close by—how can we ever take our magic wishing-rings and giant-sized Man-Things seriously again?!

Those giant-sized Man-Things are perhaps more relevant than some cosplay nay-sayers might like to admit. It's true that comics in recent years has tended to define itself as authentic, serious, and male against the frivolous artificiality of cosplay. But in other contexts, it's comics themselves that have been defined as feminized, frivolous, and artificial. Bart Beaty in his 2012 book Comics vs. Art pointed out that high art has often framed comics as "feminized kitsch"—much to the discomfort of comics creators. Pop artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and (more recently) Jeff Koons use comic books as a way to tweak high-art seriousness and the cult of the swaggering expressive male genius. In doing so, they linked comics to gayness, femininity, and camp. Beaty says that the massive success of the Adam West Batman TV series was especially painful for comics fans, since that show "drew heavily on a camp aesthetic." It did this, not least, through its colorful costumes. Ellis scorns the non-stick-thin bodies of cosplayers, but before those folks dressed up, Adam West was proudly sporting his Bat-paunch, to the delight of many a lusty villaineness.

More, according to Beaty, pop art was often validated as masculine itself in comparison to feminized comics. Lichtenstein, he says, has been figured as "a masculinized saviour of commercial culture" in comparison to "popular forms" like comics that are seen as "sentimental and feminized." In the catalogue for the 1993 traveling exhibition High & Low, curators Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, for example, argued that "Pop art saved the comics." Pop art used comics to undermine masculinity, and then, in Beaty's view, built its own masculinity on a vision of itself swooping down to rescue a lower art form in distress.

The backlash to cosplay is in part guys trying to keep girls out of the male clubhouse. But in this context it can also be seen as feminized guys panicking at yet another in a long line of demonstrations that the male clubhouse isn't all that male to begin with. You could argue that cosplay's associations with fashion actually make it more highbrow than comics—the New York fashion runway and the New York gallery scene are more kin than either is to low pulp superhero comics. Cosplay is appropriating superheroes for art, much as pop art has done—and some in comics fear the results.

But they shouldn't. The truth is that cosplay is not a continuation of pop-art denigration by other means. Instead, it's an antidote. Pop art's self-conscious manipulation of comics is only possible, or painful, in a world where comics defines its legitimacy in narrow terms. Lichtenstein is only an outsider co-opting comics if you insist on seeing Lichtenstein as something other than a comics artist himself. Cosplay—like the Batman TV series before it—could be a way for fans to be the pop artists: to cast aside the wearisome performance of legitimacy for a more flamboyant, less agonized fandom. Once you stop neurotically policing boundaries, the question of whether comics or superheroes are masculine or feminine becomes irrelevant. If superheroes and comics are for everyone, that "everyone" automatically includes people of all genders, wearing whatever they wish.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertain...rity/383617/2/

[Kobi]

When it comes to stopping violence against women, actions speak louder than words. So even though there’s increased worldwide awareness about violence against women, the problem won’t be solved unless countries make significant policy and financial changes to support victims, according to a five-part series of studies in The Lancet, one of the world’s premier medical journals.

The series, entitled “Violence Against Women and Girls,” calls the violence a “global public health and clinical problem of epidemic proportions,” and the statistics are bleak. 100-140 million women have undergone female genital mutilation worldwide, and 3 million African girls per year are at risk. 7% of women will be sexually assaulted by someone besides their partner in their lifetimes. Almost 70 million girls worldwide have been married before they turned 18. According to WHO estimates, 30% of women worldwide have experienced partner violence. The researchers said that these problems could only be solved with political action and increased funding, since the violence has continued “despite increased global attention,” implying awareness is not enough.

“No magic wand will eliminate violence against women and girls,” series co-lead Charlotte Watts, founding Director of the Gender Violence and Health Centre at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said in a statement. “But evidence tells us that changes in attitudes and behavior are possible, and can be achieved within less than a generation.”

One of the major problems highlighted in the Lancet series is that much of the current research on violence against women has been conducted in high-income countries, and it’s mostly been focused on response instead of prevention. The study found that the key driver of violence in most middle-and-low income countries is gender inequality, and that it would be near impossible to prevent abuse without addressing the underlying political, economic, and educational marginalization of women.

The study also found that health workers are often uniquely positioned to help victims, since they’re often the first to know about the abuse.

“Health-care providers are often the first point of contact for women and girls experiencing violence,” says another series co-lead, Dr. Claudia Garcia-Moreno, a physician at the WHO, in a statement. “The health community is missing important opportunities to integrate violence programming meaningfully into public health initiatives on HIV/AIDS, adolescent health, maternal health, and mental health.”

The series makes five concrete recommendations to curb the violence against women. The authors urge nations to allocate resources to prioritize protecting victims, change structures and policies that discriminate against women, promote support for survivors, strengthen health and education sectors to prevent and respond to violence, and invest in more research into ways to address the problem. In other words: money, education, and political action are key to protecting the world’s most vulnerable women. Hashtag activism, celebrity songs, and stern PSAs are helpful, but this problem is too complicated to be solved by awareness alone.

“We now have some promising findings to show what works to prevent violence,” said Dr. Cathy Zimmerman from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “We urgently need to turn this evidence into genuine action so that women and girls can live violence-free lives.”

The study comes just in time for the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

http://time.com/3598444/lancet-viole...-women-global/

----------------------


And how much money was wasted on a global study to show what feminists have been saying for centuries?

[Kobi]

Protestors in New York flooded the streets last week, toting signs that blazed with images and phrases about cruel injustice.

Just a week after similar events in Ferguson, a grand jury ruled that Daniel Pantaleo — the NYPD officer who put Eric Garner, a 44-year-old, black, Staten Island man, in a chokehold that led to Garner’s death — should not be brought to trial for his actions.

A failure to indict the police officer responsible for Garner’s unjustifiable, illegal, and unnecessary death signifies why there’s been a breach of trust between communities of color and those tasked with enforcing the laws.

In black American communities, we are holding our breath, waiting for whoever’s next. There is no guarantee that the next victim will be a black male, but there appears to be a guarantee that the victim will be marginalized or forgotten by the mainstream media if she is a girl or woman of color.

The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a non-profit organization whose mission is to defend the human rights of black people, found that every 40 hours, a black man, woman, or child is killed by police, security guards, or self-appointed law enforcers. In fact, since the killing of Mike Brown, more than 14 black teens have been killed by the police, including 12-year-old Tamir Rice, a boy in Cleveland, Ohio who was murdered less than two seconds after police arrived at a playground to answer a 911 call related to a black child carrying a pellet gun. We know another Eric Garner is coming, and it is impossible to prepare for the onslaught of grief that will accompany the next traumatic injustice.

But one of the largest injustices is how little we collectively discuss the many women of color who are also killed by police.

Take Aiyana Jones, 7, who was killed by a Detroit police officer as she slept on her father’s couch. Or Rekia Boyd, 22, whose life ended in Chicago when she was killed by a police officer. Or Yvette Smith, 48, who was unarmed when she was killed by a police officer in Texas. Or Pearlie Smith, 93, who was fatally shot in her home. Or Tarika Wilson, 26, whose one-year-old son was also injured when she was killed by a Ohio police officer. Or Tyisha Miller, 19, who was killed by a police officer in Los Angeles. Or Kathryn Johnson, 92, who was killed by a police officer in Atlanta. Or Gabriella Nevarez, 22, who was killed by a Sacramento police officer. Or Eleanor Bumpurs, 66, who was killed by a police officer in the Bronx. I could go on and on, but you still probably wouldn’t recognize their names.

While we grieve with the families of Brown, Garner, and countless others, black women are tired of being placed at the fringes of the conversations about state-sanctioned violence. Justice can’t only apply to black males.

While some news outlets covered these women’s deaths, many chose to overlook them because they’re women, and more specifically, black women. Their deaths seem to have little value. As writer Victoria Law explains in Bitch magazine, the names of unarmed black women killed by police “very rarely stick in public memory and never gain the same traction as Eric Garner or Michael Brown.” Sexism impacts every aspect of black women’s lives, including how we’re treated, or not addressed, in media after our deaths. Yet our experiences with law enforcement are very similar to that of black men.

As a black woman, I’m not immune to the fear. My heart pounds rapidly every time I see blue-and-red lights flashing in my rearview mirror. I never know if I will be alive when I leave those brief encounters with police officers. One wrong move could cost me my life, and that is a fear that haunts me as I move through the world every day.

If the next victim of police violence is a black woman or girl, her name will probably not resonate as loudly as that of Mike Brown and Eric Garner. Her face won’t adorn posters protesting the mistreatment of black women by police officers, because police violence is often coded as male, as Dr. Treva B. Lindsey of Ohio State University explains.

Prevailing narratives around Black violability and anti-Black racial violence pivot around Black men and boys. Both historically and contemporarily, when many people working towards racial justice around the issue of racial violence, the presumptive victim is a Black male. From lynching to police brutality, the presumed victim is a Black male. Therefore, Black women and girls are viewed as exceptional victims as opposed to perpetual victims of anti-Black racial violence. Our narratives around racial violence, unfortunately, have yet to evolve into ones that are gender inclusive. Black Victim=Black Male.

Female victims of color are marginalized, and always have been. Renowned social justice warrior and organizer Fannie Lou Hamer was savagely beaten by Mississippi police officers in 1963. She developed a blood clot in the eye, damaged kidneys, and a limp that would remain with her for the rest of her life as a result of the beating. Yet, the sexual and physical terrorism committed against Hamer isn’t discussed as often as the repeated arrests of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr or Malcolm X.

Even now, police violence inflicted upon women of color — like Boyd and Jones, who were both unarmed when they were fatally shot by police officers — doesn’t dominate headlines the way the killings of Garner and Brown do. No concrete data has been collected on the number of black women who are killed by law enforcement, and that’s no coincidence; most of the time, we barely know their names. While we grieve with the families of Brown, Garner, and countless others, black women are tired of being placed at the fringes of the conversations about state-sanctioned violence. Justice can’t only apply to black males.

Social justice leaders are organizing and meeting with Congressional and international leaders to push toward laws that will insure that people of color are safe to stand in front of convenience stores without being choked to death. But as we wait for those laws to be seen as necessary, and we wait for police officers to wear body cameras, and we wait for a shift in how police officers are trained, we also wait for female victims of color to receive equal acknowledgement.

Native New Yorkers, like me, know how brutal the New York Police Department is. We’ve lived through Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Kimani Gray, and the countless others who’ve lost their lives at the hands of those designated to protect and serve us. Eric Garner is the newest member of that lineage of men of color who are killed by the New York Police Department, and whose families have to watch their loved ones receive minimal justice. All black women request is that our deaths matter too.

http://www.bustle.com/articles/52433...-hear-about-it

[Kobi]

A Missouri Republican is pushing a bill that would allow a man who gets a woman pregnant to stop her from having an abortion. The measure would force a woman who wants an abortion to obtain written permission from the father first—unless she was the victim of "legitimate rape."

Rick Brattin, a state representative from outside Kansas City, filed the bill on December 3 for next year's legislative session. The proposed measure reads, "No abortion shall be performed or induced unless and until the father of the unborn child provides written, notarized consent to the abortion."

The bill contains exceptions for women who become pregnant as the result of rape or incest—but there are caveats.

"Just like any rape, you have to report it, and you have to prove it," Brattin tells Mother Jones. "So you couldn't just go and say, 'Oh yeah, I was raped' and get an abortion. It has to be a legitimate rape."

Brattin adds that he is not using the term "legitimate rape" in the same way as former Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), who famously claimed that women couldn't get pregnant from a "legitimate rape" because "the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down."

"I'm just saying if there was a legitimate rape, you're going to make a police report, just as if you were robbed," Brattin says. "That's just common sense." Under his bill, he adds, "you have to take steps to show that you were raped…And I'd think you'd be able to prove that." The bill contains no provision establishing standards for claiming the rape or incest exceptions. It also doesn't state any specific penalties for violating the law nor say whether a penalty would be imposed on the woman seeking the abortion or the abortion provider.

Missouri is home to only one abortion clinic, based in St. Louis. Each year, legislators target the clinic with dozens of new restrictions. In 2014, the GOP-controlled Legislature approved a bill requiring women seeking an abortion to wait 72 hours between the initial consultation and the procedure. It's the longest abortion waiting period in the county.

A group of Democratic lawmakers in Missouri found the onslaught of anti-abortion bills so ridiculous that in 2012 they introduced a bill to ban vasectomies except to save the life of a man. If conservative male lawmakers imagined jumping through hoops to obtain reproductive services, the thinking went, they would see the absurdity of their anti-abortion crusade.

Not Brattin. The father of five says that his recent vasectomy was the inspiration for this bill.

"When a man goes in for that procedure—at least in the state of Missouri—you have to have a consent form from your spouse in order to have that procedure done," he says. "Here I was getting a normal procedure that has nothing to do with another human being's life, and I needed to get a signed form…But on ending a life, you don't. I think that's pretty twisted."

A spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, a group of clinics that perform vasectomies, says that there is no law in Missouri requiring a man to get another person's permission for a vasectomy. Individual providers sometimes require a patient to have his partner's consent. (Planned Parenthood of Missouri does not.) Brattin saved the document his wife signed and intends to share it with other lawmakers when it comes time to promote his bill.

Brattin notes that his bill also contains an exception for cases in which continuing the pregnancy would endanger the life of the mother. Women whose partners have died can sign a sworn affidavit to that effect.

When asked if he would support an exception for women whose partners are abusive, Brattin says, "I haven't really thought about that aspect of it." But he adds, "What does that have to do with the child's life? Just because it was an abusive relationship, does that mean the child should die?" Brattin notes that women in these situations can obtain protective custody once the child is born.

Asked about Casey v. Planned Parenthood, a 1992 Supreme Court decision striking down a requirement that a woman inform her husband if she haves an abortion, Brattin says he doesn't believe the ruling affects his bill. Because Missouri has laws requiring men to pay child support during a pregnancy, he contends, a bill requiring a man's involvement in an abortion should be constitutional.

In 2013, Brattin sponsored a bill to give intelligent design and "destiny" the same amount of attention in Missouri textbooks as evolution. Brattin has cosponsored many anti-abortion bills, including several measures restricting medication abortions that passed the Missouri Legislature in recent years. His latest bill, which would allow a man to veto a woman's decision to get an abortion, is identical to a measure Brattin proposed in April that died in committee.

"This bill is insulting and a danger to women in abusive relationships," says M'Evie Mead, the director of statewide organizing for Missouri's Planned Parenthood affiliated. "That's very much our concern. But when it comes to abortion, Missouri legislators are always trying to outdo each other."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...aving-abortion

[Gemme]

Airline has Outdated Policy for Female Flight Attendents

[Kobi]

Cosmopolitan surveyed 2,235 full-time and part-time female employees and found that one in three women has experienced sexual harassment at work at some point their lives.

"Sexual harassment hasn't gone away -- it's just taken on new forms," Michelle Ruiz and Lauren Ahn wrote. Unlike workplace sexual harassment portrayed in films and pop culture that represent it as overtly aggressive, sexual harassment at work isn't always easy to spot. It can be a sexual comment in a meeting or even an insinuating Facebook message.

The American Association of University Women defines workplace sexual harassment as any, "unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, or other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature."

Out of the women who said they've experienced workplace sexual harassment, 29 percent reported the issue while 71 percent did not. According to the survey, the field with the highest levels of reported sexual harassment is food and service hospitality.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/0...ss&ir=Business

[Kobi]

[Allison W]

Somewhat unusually for a men's magazine, GQ has apparently been getting into progressive investigative journalism recently. Jeff Sharlet attended the first national conference for A Voice For Men to report on the, uhm, "highlights," as it were.

It's a somewhat lengthy article at three pages of decent length, so I won't copy it here; instead, I'll just link to it.

Seriously, though. That first picture and its associated caption on the first page. My only commentary there is "welp."

Also, don't wade into the comments section unless you want to see the Men's Rights Bowel Movement brigade crying all over it. Article by GQ, comments by QQ.

[Gemme]

Oh my.

I couldn't make it through the whole thing.

I got stuck somewhere around here:

"Responding to a feminist critic, he once wrote, "The idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection." But that kind of talk is just for show, he says. He points out he used to be a counselor. What he's doing, really, is a kind of therapy. He wants me to understand."

[Gemme]

Youtube assaults.

[Kobi]

An 18-year-old who attempted to murder three women in revenge for the fact he was still a virgin has been jailed for 21 years.

Ben Moynihan, of Knightstone Court, Portsmouth, was found guilty in January of stabbing the women as they walked home alone.

They were attacked in separate incidents in Portsmouth last summer.

Moynihan must serve an additional five years on licence after his sentence ends, Winchester Crown Court heard.

During his trial, jurors heard Moynihan had difficulties finding a girlfriend and losing his virginity.

'Chilling and disturbing'

Police found a note which read "all women needs to die" and a journal containing descriptions of violence Moynihan dubbed his "diary of evil".

They also uncovered letters in which Moynihan said his frustration at not being able to lose his virginity had led to the attacks.

He wrote: "I was planning to murder mainly women as an act of revenge because of the life they gave me, I'm still a virgin at 17," he wrote.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-31765086

[Kobi]

BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Brazil, where a woman is killed every two hours, is imposing tougher punishments on those who murder women and girls, as part of a government bid to stem a rise in gender killings.

President Dilma Rousseff said the new law gave a legal definition to the crime of femicide - the killing of a woman by a man because of her gender - and set out jail sentences of 12 to 30 years for convicted offenders.

The law, signed by Rousseff on Monday, also includes longer jail terms for crimes committed against pregnant women, girls under 14, women over 60 and people with disabilities.

Brazil joins 15 other Latin American countries which have brought in laws against femicide in recent years.

"This law typifies femicide as a grave crime and identifies it as a specific crime against women. It's a way to talk about this problem, make it visible by giving it a name and increasing sanctions for this crime," said Nadine Gasman, head of the agency United Nations Women in Brazil.

"It has taken us a long time to say that the killing of a woman is a different phenomenon. Men are killed in the street, women are killed in the home. Men are killed with guns, women with knives and hands," Gasman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.

The number of women murdered in Brazil rose by 230 percent from 1980 to 2010, government figures show.

An average of 4,500 women are killed in the country every year, Gasman said.

"Femicide is part of the big increase in violence in general in Brazil. The underlying causes are discrimination against women and inequality, and in Brazil black women are the poorest and the most discriminated against," she said.

More research is needed to better understand the reasons for the big increase in gender killings in Brazil, Gasman said.

Femicide is a widespread problem across Latin America.

More than half the 25 countries with the highest femicide rates are in the Americas, according to a 2012 report by the Small Arms Survey, an independent research project in Geneva, based on 2004 to 2009 figures.

It is common for victims of femicide to have a long history of domestic violence and the perpetrators are often the victims' current or former partners, family members or friends, U.N. Women says.

"Our experience in the region and in Brazil shows femicide is part of a cycle of violence and it's the most intense form of violence ... that becomes graver and graver. It doesn't come out of the blue," Gasman said.

Femicide also stems from a macho culture that tends to condone violence against women and blames women for it, which in turn leads to low prosecution rates for gender-related crimes.

"This is a further step in Brazil's legislation in the fight against sexism that kills women daily in our country," Brazilian congresswoman Maria do Rosario said on her Facebook page, after the femicide law was introduced.

The challenge now is to ensure that the law is put into practice and that police, prosecutors and forensic experts are trained in how to investigate cases of femicide.

"It's always a challenge implementing laws but having this law makes it compulsory to investigate this crime with a gender perspective," Gasman said.

http://www.trust.org/item/20150310173857-1nfvn

[Kobi]

Last year, an anonymous entrepreneur detailed on Forbes.com the many obstacles—and sometimes outright harassment—she faced when trying to raise money from venture capitalists while female. There were unwanted back massages and a pitch meeting at which she was asked, “Did your daddy give you money?”

It's not just the old guard doing the discriminating, she wrote:

Justin Mateen ... stated [allegedly] that having a young female cofounder at Tinder “makes the company seem like a joke” and “devalues” it. Or the comments of the male 20-something Twitter employee, who told me, “You should really hire a nerdy looking dude to represent your company publicly. You know, to make up for your looks.”

Women are now the majority of college students and about half of all managers in the broader workforce, but in the startup world, they number comparatively few. According to the Kauffman Foundation, they account for only about 16 percent of employers, and they make up only 10 percent of founders of so-called “high-growth” firms—startups that quickly add workers rather than fizzling out. Overall, women own only 36 percent of all small businesses.

The reasons for this disparity are hotly debated in the tech world. Some blame the stereotype that women are supposedly less tolerant of risk, or that they prioritize motherhood over the punishing hours of startup life.
"They didn't know what to do with me."

Others point to the hyper-macho atmosphere of Silicon Valley and other venture hubs. Just this week, interim Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, a former junior partner at the investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, testified in a lawsuit against her former employer that she was allegedly denied a promotion because of her gender. Among the issues involved are whether Pao's personality was deemed too "prickly" and why the company organized a men-only ski trip.

Lakshmi Balachandra, now a professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College, traversed this cultural divide when she worked at two venture capital firms—one mostly male, the other mostly female—in the late 90s. While at the male firm, occasionally entrepreneurs would assume she was an assistant, she said, or they would ask her out in the middle of meetings. But mostly, the firm's partners, "didn't know what to do with me. Like they were a little more formal," she said.

"Did it feel like they were trying really hard not to be sexist?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "That's a perfect way to put it."

One of the biggest reasons more women don’t start businesses is that female entrepreneurs have a more difficult time raising money. The Kauffman Foundation notes that, "For male entrepreneurs, 60 percent of startup funding was raised from outside sources, such as bank loans or angel investors, compared to 48 percent for women entrepreneurs. Women entrepreneurs are recipients of just 19 percent of angel funding and even less of venture capital funding.” A 2014 Babson College report similarly found that, although things are getting better, companies with a female CEO only received 3 percent of total venture capital dollars in the previous two years.

Fiona Murray, the associate dean of innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, recently conducted an experiment in which participants evaluated a video pitch from a new company that used slides, an identical script, and either a male or female voice-over. The male voice was 40 percent more likely to receive funding, as Murray wrote in the Boston Globe. “In a follow-up experiment, we found that evaluators particularly favor pitches from attractive men, and that attractive women do worse than unattractive men and women,” she added."Evaluators particularly favor pitches from attractive men, and that attractive women do worse than unattractive men and women.”

Sarah Thebaud, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara, decided to try to determine why this gender gap in startup funding persists. In three experiments, she tested what a group of 178 college students thought about a series of business plans, and indirectly, the gender of the business owners behind them.

The study, published last month in the journal Social Forces, was conducted with two types of business plans: an “innovative” one and a “non-innovative” one. The non-innovative business was a new iteration of a model that’s been proven to work before (a typical wine store), while the innovative one presented an entirely new idea (a store that provides customers the ingredients, tools, and guidance to make and bottle their own wine.)

“Most businesses tend to replicate others that are similar—one pizza place may be a little different from another, but basically they’re all serving the same thing,” Thebaud explained in an article about the study in a UCSB publication. Thebaud presented the subjects with the same innovative and non-innovative business plans, but she manipulated the gender of the business owner, listing it as either Laura, Julie, David, or Jason.

The results suggest that investors are less likely to back female entrepreneurs because they don’t think they’re as smart as men are. The participants thought the non-innovative female business owner was less competent than the innovative one, but the level of ingenuity didn’t matter for the competence ratings of the male entrepreneurs. The non-innovative women were also rated as less competent than similarly run-of-the-mill men.

Thebaud tested other potential reasons the female entrepreneurs might have been discredited, like perceived likability or commitment, but they didn’t hold up.

To Thebaud, the fact that the innovative women, but not men, had higher competence ratings than their less-innovative peers suggests that women who launch especially intriguing ventures—not just a pie shop, but a paleo pie shop—seem more “authentically entrepreneurial.” The risky nature of their businesses might broadcast these women's resemblance to men.

“It signals to people that she is, indeed, aggressive and outgoing, willing to take risks and push barriers, which is what people often think women might not be willing to do,” Thebaud said.

It's worth noting that on some platforms, such as Kickstarter, cash is more likely to flow to women than to men. Still, Thebaud's results are troubling: They suggest that female founders are at an overall fundraising disadvantage unless their ideas are mind-blowing While some startups are revolutionary, most are ordinary businesses that aren’t especially sexy but make their backers (and hopefully a handful of employees) some money. For every new Facebook, there are scores of boring, yet profitable, pizzerias or inventory-management software systems. Apparently, women aren't taken as seriously when they pitch them.

Balachandra recently conducted a study that echoed Thebaud's findings. For her research, which is currently under review for publication, Balachandra examined how venture capitalists reacted to one-minute pitches from male and female startup founders in various industries. The main factor that determined whether the entrepreneurs were successful, she found, was how stereotypically "masculine" they behaved. The entrepreneurs—male and female—who were confident, stern, strong, and bold were much more likely to win funding for their ventures. The ones who were more stereotypically female, which to Balachandra's team meant they acted happier, kinder, and more excited, tended to lose. Importantly, there was no gender gap: The manly women performed better than the effeminate men did.

Balachandra thinks the explanation might lie in the fact that venture capitalists tend to invest in people who are similar to them—and all but 6 percent of VCs are men. Investors spend hours coaching their financial charges, so they might prioritize the type of fraternal chemistry that comes with interacting with someone of the same sex. "A VC will say, 'I only want to invest in someone I can have dinner with,'" Balachandra said.

What's more, female entrepreneurs often pitch businesses that appeal more to women than to men—and male VCs simply don't bother to try to understand them.

Balachandra says one solution is to breed more female venture capitalists—and keep existing ones from quitting. When she was working in the industry in the 90s, she started a networking group for fellow female investors in her area. None of the women in the group are still working in venture capital, she said.

And, she added, male investors need to do a better job finding the female entrepreneurs who are worthy of their time and money. Too often, male investors will rely on male-bonding type activities to pick their entrepreneurs, she says. "But you're assuming that just because you're sailing with someone that they're also going to be a good entrepreneur."

"[VCs] say 'women don't seek me out,' but a lot of women aren't in those circles," she explained. "You're not making an effort."

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...#disqus_thread

----------------------------

In 2015 it is kind of flabbergasting to see the same sexist and misogynistic behavior as I did in the 1960's. With all the female and male parents jumping on the "Im a feminist" bandwagon these days, one has to wonder exactly who is teaching their daughters and sons this behavior. (Yes Sheldon, that was sarcasm.)