In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: July 2015

Amnesty International, CATW, a bunch of celebrities, and decriminalization

[Content note: sex trafficking and sexual abuse]

Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Lena Dunham, Emily Blunt, and numerous other celebrities, along with former sex workers and victims of sex trafficking and women’s rights advocates, have signed a letter from the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) criticizing a policy currently under discussion within Amnesty International. The policy, which Amnesty plans to introduce at a meeting in Dublin in August, promotes decriminalization of sex work to protect sex workers’ rights, health, and safety.

Quick hit: New York magazine, Bill Cosby, and #TheEmptyChair

[Content note: sexual assault]

The current cover of New York magazine is significant not just for who’s there — 35 of the women who have accused Bill Cosby of rape — but for who isn’t there — victims of sexual assault who are afraid or ashamed to come forward. Those individuals are represented by an empty chair, including those unspeaking individuals in the “unwelcome sisterhood” of Cosby’s alleged* victims.

Kids in Public: And Thus Have I Provided You a Definitive List of Rules

[Content note: a topic that’s been discussed to hell and back and yet is being discussed back to hell again because this is my blog and I get to]

It’s happened again. Again. It’s always going to happen, and it’s always going to spur debate: A couple brought a kid to a restaurant, the kid was noisy, there was an exchange of some level of vehemence between the restaurant owner and the parents, and everyone has flipped out.

Nigeria bans female genital mutilation

[Content note: female genital mutilation (obviously)]

A new ban, passed in May and signed into law by outgoing president Goodluck Jonathan, outlaws female genital mutilation in Nigeria. The practice was banned worldwide by the U.N. in 2012 and already outlawed in several states within Nigeria, but the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015 represents a nationwide commitment to the ban. The new law also outlaws abandonment of spouse and/or dependents without financial support, and battery.

Quick hit: Seventh-Grade Hijabis Ruined Rainbow Day

Rainbow Day was supposed to be a day to show school spirit — a day when each class would wear a color, and they’d all stand in lines to make a rainbow and take a picture of the rainbow, and it was going to be awesome. Not, like, a gay rainbow or anything — rainbows aren’t just for gay pride, they’re also for heavenly covenants and leprechauns and middle-school teachers who owned way too many Lisa Frank school supplies as a kid. The only thing standing in the teacher’s way: four Muslim girls in her class who showed up for Rainbow Day in black hijabs and not the purple clothes they’d been assigned.

Spillover #29

Time for our twenty-ninth #spillover thread. Some reminders:

1. #spillover is part of our comment moderation system for keeping other threads on-topic by providing a separate constructive space for side-discussions.
2. Commenters are encouraged to respect the topic of each post and cheerfully volunteer to take off-topic side-discussions into #spillover.

Fifty Shades of Whatever, I Don’t Even Care Anymore, Life Is Meaningless: Grey

In a bid to wring every last cent out of the “Fifty Shades” phenomenon, author E.L. James has released Grey, the story of Fifty Shades of Grey as told from Christian Grey’s perspective. Some readers, both fans of the series and critics, were curious about Christian’s thought process during the original books, since the story we see from Ana’s point of view was so deeply creepy that dear God, there had to be something, something, something redeeming in the backstory to make it more of an edgy, kinky romance and less of an episode of Law & Order: SVU with a private helicopter.