It was difficult watching a far-right judge confirmed for a stolen Supreme Court seat this week. On that and other issues, it’s tempting to think about the might-have-beens, if the we’d had someone in the White House who viewed women as important.
Welcome to This Week in the War on Women, where the news is mostly bad but the company’s great. Thanks as always to Besame, mettle fatigue, ramara, elenacarlena, Eyesbright, and the rest of the WOW crew for links and discussion.
Workplace Issues:
For years, being the wife of a male academic or writer meant taking on the unpaid labor of typing his manuscript. Those who remember life before word processors understand exactly how much work this was.
April 4th was Equal Pay Day, reflecting the extra time it takes for women’s pay to catch up with men’s. Of course, that’s before you take racial discrimination into account: for African-American women, Equal Pay Day won’t get here until August.
Microsoft got kudos for a soft-focus ad campaign urging girls to buck the odds and go into STEM careers. Monica Byrne has a different take:
Microsoft, where’s your ad campaign telling adult male scientists not to rape their colleagues in the field? Where’s the campaign telling them not to steal or take credit for women’s work? Or not to serially sexually harass their students? Not to discriminate against them? Not to ignore, dismiss, or fail to promote them at the same rate as men? Not to publish their work at a statistically significant lower rate? Not to refuse to take women on field expeditions, as did my graduate advisor, now tenured at University of Washington? Where’s your ad campaign telling institutions not to hire, shelter, or give tenure to serial harassers or known sexists, as UW and countless others have done? Where’s your ad campaign encouraging scientific journals to switch to blind submissions and blind peer reviewers? Or to pay women at the same rate as men?
In spite of which, women apparently now control 51% of US wealth. Which seems odd, or at least emphasizes how wealth and income inequality are increasing. And how wealth and work are definitely different things.
Violence and Harassment:
Advertisers continue to dump Bill O’Reilly over the latest revelations about sexual harassment settlements. But this is far from the first time this issue has come up with him: why didn’t they pull the plug on him years ago? Amanda Marcotte notes that misogyny has always been central to his brand.
Facebook has new tools to combat revenge porn. Unfortunately, it still depends on a user being willing to flag the content. As we saw from the growing scandal in the armed forces, that’s not always the case.
Bodycam video of the police intervention that let a killer go and told his girlfriend to stop calling 911, three hours before he killed her and one of her sons, injuring her other son, her father, and two bystanders.
This article about girls being groped on public transportation in Japan is from last month, but I haven’t seen it before. It’s a serious look at women who are trying to change a culture that sees this as trivial. The focus has been to get girls to talk about it, but the larger issue still looms.
At age 13, Tina Frundt was a victim of sex trafficking. Now she’s running a DC-based organization helping other trafficking survivors get out.
Reproductive Rights:
After the NYT published another op-ed arguing that women’s reproductive freedom should be thrown under the bus in order for Democrats to win, NARAL’s Ilyse Hogue sets the record straight.
Texas abortion foes want to protect disabled fetuses — but not disabled children.
About Texas and living children (if you needed proof) — They had to stop keeping women with children in detention facilities because they failed to meet the standards for child care centers. So Texas has proposed a solution — license the detention centers as child care centers, and make them exempt from those requirements.
Dr. Willie Parker’s memoir traces his journey from anti-choice to pro-choice, and calls for a “new theology of abortion.”
Health:
Planned Parenthood videos show how to discuss STD’s with a new partner.
Maryland to reimburse Planned Parenthood if federal funds vanish.
Maryland became the first state in the nation to agree to reimburse Planned Parenthood clinics for their services if Congress defunds the organization after Republican Gov. Larry Hogan allowed the bill to become law on Thursday without his signature.
Women Leading by Example
Sometimes a little child does lead. This two-year-old who wants to be a doctor can teach us all what’s important.
Sonia Sotomayor discusses civic participation at the Aspen Institute Latinos and Society program.
Uncategorizable:
Mike Pence’s refusal to be alone with a woman (other than his wife) is not unheard of in Evangelical “purity” culture. It stems from a view of women as sexual temptations, and assumes that men are incapable of controlling their own behavior. When Pence has no experience interacting with women as just people, it means he doesn’t hear from women on issues that directly affect women’s lives.
Similarly, The Federalist posted an article from a Lutheran pastor making the tired old “When Harry Met Sally” argument that men are simply incapable of valuing women for anything other than sex:
There’s Only One Thing You Can Give His Man Friends Can’t
If, then, the average male coworker, male neighbor, or male Nepalese yak herder is better at producing masculine companionship, why is an average man giving his business to you? It’s not because he wants your friendship. It’s because he wants to convince you to open up the supply chain of a romantic relationship to him, and he foolishly believes he can do so by being a loyal friendship customer. “Pay my dues in the Friend Zone,” he thinks, “and one day she’ll promote me to boyfriend.”
Um...supply chain? The rest of the article is even worse. Here’s Dave Futrelle’s slice-and-dice of it.
taking up spaCe
Better Speak from Nayani (9'Knee) Thiyagarajah on Vimeo.
. . . "Better Speak" (2017) is the latest documentary short directed by UN Women [and] features nine young feminists from around the world, as they share what it meant for them to personally take up space and participate at UN Women's 61st Commission on the Status of Women (March 13-24, 2017) - especially in this current political climate.
...the goal of the weekend was “collaboration, not competition.” At eight-thirty, spokespeople for the teams that had been forming in the hackathon’s Slack channel lined up to make thirty-second pitches for their projects. One team planned to create an online fund-raising tool for women seeking abortions. Another proposed building an anonymous social network, since women who share abortion stories on Facebook are often bullied. Other teams would make smartphone apps that could tell a woman her options based on her age, weeks into pregnancy, and Zip code. They would design bots to search government sites, using keywords to pull and parse new legislation that might affect access. The event materials used the language of reproductive justice, calling for prenatal care, healthy food, clean water, and child care for women who want to become mothers—as well as abortion for women who do not. Still, the organizers expected pushback. “We got our first bloody fetus on the hashtag!” the social-media manager, Andrea Grimes, exclaimed around nine p.m. “We didn’t even do much publicity.”
Petition and Action
Bill O’Reilly needs to go: petition from UltraViolet.
Supporting Planned Parenthood and standing up to Gorsuch.
Women are core community organizers for transformation but we have been written out of history. This video of East Los Angeles Latinx women is “...a testament to the power of grassroots organizations who want to have an effect on the community around them.”
from Remezcla
With a tagline like “Ovaries so big we don’t need no fuckin’ balls!” the East Los Angeles biking group Ovarian Psycos announces to anyone listening that they are womxn who don’t mess around. Organized around “feminist ideals with indigena understanding and an urban/hood mentality” as they write in their site, the Ovas have been taking to the streets and organizing as a community to make their neighborhood safer for women since 2010.
In the documentary that bears their name, directed by Joanna Sokolowski and Kate Trumbull-LaValle, audiences get an inside look at this proudly brown Latinx collective. Mixing on-the-bike footage from the Ovas’ rides with intimate looks at the personal lives of some of their members, Ovarian Psycos is a call to arms against violence against women, against gentrification, and against institutionalized prejudices that communities of color face daily. [...]
Of course, that it’s led by badass brown women who get shit done is in itself a reason to catch this doc and support the work the Ovarian Psycos do. It’s not every day you get to witness firsthand what it is black and brown women have to deal with, and the immense courage and resilience it takes to try to change the world for the better.
And one more….
If you need a good laugh after all that news, check out the hashtag #MansplainedSongs.