There's s surprising amount of good news this week, especially out of the Middle East - though sometimes "good news" just means undoing a previous step backward.
The good, the bad and the ugly below the orange whirlygig.
Workplace issues:
Mother Jones has a roundup of loser men mansplaining why women suck at any given profession. Meanwhile, in the real world, the authors of What Works for Women at Work discuss four common patterns of gender bias in the workplace.
Not exactly a surprise, but employed single mothers are disproportionately likely to live in poverty.
It's (still) women politicians who get concern-trolled on their personal lives.
Reproductive rights:
One body, two sets of rights: on the ongoing criminalization of pregnant women.
With no place in the vicinity to get a legal abortion, Pennsylvania mother Jennifer Whalen helped her 16-year-old daughter get an illegal one by purchasing drugs off the internet. Whalen is now being criminally charged.
Intersections of race & gender:
Across the country the big news this week was the trial of Michael Dunn, the white Floridian who killed Jordan Davis, an unarmed African-American teen. The attorney for Davis's family released a video interview with one of Dunn's neighbors. I was struck that Dunn has something else in common with fellow killer George Zimmerman: multiple accusations of severe domestic violence, against more than one woman. (I don't know if Dunn was ever arrested for DV; we do know that Zimmeman was.) Both men seem to have assumed that certain groups (wives/girlfriends, young African-American men) can be targeted with little fear of consequences. Maybe if something was done about the domestic violence, Dunn and Zimmerman wouldn't have had the chance to escalate all the way to homicide?
On a visit to Rwanda, Jill Filipovic has some thoughts on how racial-supremacist ideologies will politicize women's sexuality, reproduction and notions of purity. The parallels with white-supremacist views of "white womanhood" are hard to miss.
Some thoughts on the Good Black Girl Complex.
Violence:
A piece on Patrick Henry College, "God's Harvard," describes how "purity culture" is the purest form of rape culture. It's especially disheartening to see multiple victims describe how the female Dean of Students found ways to victim-blame and excuse sexual assault.
Dear men: time to check your peers on street harassment.
Using FBI and DOJ statistics, Buzzfeed comes up with 5 things more likely to happen to a man than being falsely accused of rape. A man is 88,000 (yes, eighty-eight thousand) times more likely to be a rape victim than to be falsely accused of rape. Guess which one the "men's rights activists" are concerned about?
Uncategorizable:
Lindy West gives a well-deserved skewering to a screed that tries to prop up outdated sex roles with faux-scientific jargon about "sexual economics:"
It's no coincidence that the people most concerned with clapping a chastity belt on the entire earth and swallowing the key are the people currently (and historically) in power in our country. And it's also no coincidence that the people with the most to gain by maintaining "traditional" family structures—by keeping women dependent and docile and shutting everyone else up—have the least nuanced understanding of how actual human beings interact with one another romantically. It's almost as if they've never known what it's like to really connect with someone as a human being—to love a partner as an equal, not as a bank account or a body.
Media:
Mocking a whiny male blogger's comment, Lightspeed magazine did a kickstarter for an all-female Women Destroy Science Fiction issue. It's been so successful that it will be followed by all-female "Women Destroy Fantasy" and "Women Destroy Horror" issues. Writer Pat Murphy explains why this matters:
Fiction writers have, in a limited sense, the power to control your mind. When you give yourself over to a good book, you come to believe in the author's world, the author's way of thinking about the way the world works. If a book is compelling, you believe in it on some very deep level. The world portrayed in the book seeps into your unconscious and becomes part of your experience of the world.
Here's the trailer for the documentary
Anita, about the Clarence Thomas hearings and Anita Hill's famous testimony on sexual harassment.
Nine depressing facts from the latest Women in Media Report.
Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show premiere included a "comedy" bit with convicted rapist Mike Tyson, and next day wasn't much of an improvement. Melissa McEwan writes Fallon a letter:
In the opening of your first show, you talked about your baby daughter, and how she is the best thing that ever happened to you. The woman raped by Mike Tyson was someone's daughter, too. So were the women he's beaten, the women and girls exploited and assaulted by R. Kelly, the women harmed by Charlie Sheen. They are someone's daughters. I am someone's daughter.
Lots of daughters, who are maybe the best things that ever happened to their fathers, have been hurt by the men whom you invited or honored on your show. Three of them, in the first two episodes.
You also talked about how it's your job to entertain people, to make them laugh. I will never understand why someone wants to be the guy who invokes rape in jokes, or overlooks a history of violence against women, in the guise of humor or entertainment.
Why do you want to be a guy who obliges a survivor, who tunes into your show for a laugh after a hard day, to ignore the specter of violent men who have repeatedly hurt women? Why do you want to be a guy who gives those men no professional consequences, who thus communicates to them that what they did doesn't matter?
Good news and action items:
I posted a couple of weeks ago about a new law in Afghanistan that would bar family members from testifying against each other, which would (among other things) make domestic violence prosecutions all but impossible. Thanks to international pressure, the law is being altered to make testifying a choice rather than barring it altogether.
A town in Afghanistan gets its first female high school graduates.
Saudi Arabia has its first female editor-in-chief of a national newspaper.
Petition to the White House Task Force on campus sexual assault: Hold colleges accountable.
Stop Street Harassment is fundraising for a national study.
Googoosh, Iran's "Queen of Pop," released a music video portraying a woman singing to her beloved about how much she wishes they could be together. At the end, the beloved is revealed to be a woman.