Whoa! A good old fashioned angry feminist manifesto from Shanley over at Medium via: An Open Letter to Women in Technology. Some strong words coming out of the tech industry. It seems to me there is some serious feminist agitation happening in the tech world these days, something I point out in my essay, Twilight of the Patriarchs in the latest issue of Eighteen Bridges magazine. To wit:
[T]ech and gaming [are] two bastions of male ‘brogrammer’ culture. But tech is also a young person’s industry, meaning an entire generation of female twenty-somethings entering the field are experiencing good-old fashioned sexism first hand and are, unsurprisingly, not standing for it.
Goes to show. Even in 2013 good old-fashioned sexism will be met with good old-fashioned fire-breathing feminism.
This is a quote from a Vice magazine interview with “Sarah”, a victim of revenge porn who decided to agitate for change by starting a website called EndRevengePorn.com.
More from the interview:
What’s the reception been like since you started your site?
I’ve had emails from people blaming the victims, saying they shouldn’t have taken the pictures and that running my site is a waste of time. But most of the contact is overwhelmingly supportive and it’s been amazing to speak to other victims. Danielle Citron is a law professor at the University of Maryland who’s writing a book on cyber harassment and she calls this the beginning of a cyber civil rights movement. Another law professor from the University of Miami has been working with me to draft legislation to propose at a federal and state level across the nation.
Kudos to Vice for the implicit support the magazine is showing for victims of revenge porn by running this interview. Unfortunately it’s pretty evident from the comments sections that Vice could really better quality of readers.
From Salon.com: National Hockey League announces initiative for gay athletes
The National Hockey League announced on Thursday a partnership with gay rights group You Can Play Project and an awareness-building initiative on gay issues for its coaches and players.
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Fascinating piece on Iceland from Al-Jazeera. The country is seriously walking the walk in its commitment to fostering sexual equality in its culture. Iceland has actually criminalized the purchase of sex, legislated that all corporation’s boards must be 40% female and banned strip clubs. Now they are considering a ban on hardcore pornography.
What’s more: these initiatives are working.
From Salon.com:
Imagine a woman does a Google search on her own name and up comes a page featuring a naked photo that she sent to an ex-boyfriend. There are links to her Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn account. In the comment thread, anonymous trolls critique every inch of her body. Perhaps her home phone number and address are also included. Say she contacts the local police in tears, only to be told that the post is perfectly legal — or worse, that “boys will be boys.”
…A new bill in Florida is aiming to remedy that: It would make it a felony to publish online nude photos or videos of a person without their permission and along with identifying information. At the same time, activists around the country are petitioning for both state and federal laws to criminalize what they call “non-consensual porn.” A recent class action lawsuit filed by more than 20 women in Texas against revenge porn site Texxxan.com along with its host GoDaddy has only turned the heat up on the issue.
1 month ago
Lady Mariachi Band! This is serious progress, people.
The day before the Supreme Court starts hearing California’s Prop 8 case, CNN/ORC International Poll delivers the news that more Americans support legal same-sex marriage and say they have a family member or close friend who is gay or lesbian.
According to the survey, fifty-seven percent of those…
2 months ago
From The Huffington Post:
A group of GOP state lawmakers in North Dakota will protest new abortion restrictions on Monday at a Stand Up for Women rally in Bismarck, N.D., because they believe their fellow Republicans have gone too far.
“It’s to say, hey, this isn’t okay. We have stepped over the line,” said state Rep. Kathy Hawken (R-Fargo) in a phone interview with The Huffington Post. “One of the key tenets of the Republican Party is personal responsibility. I’m personally pro-life, but I vote pro-choice, because you can’t make that decision for anyone else. You just can’t.”
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The Steubenville rapists claim that, when they drove a passed-out girl from party to party, slinging her into and out-of cars like a deflated sex-dolly and sticking their fingers inside her, they didn’t know they were doing anything wrong. That’s plausible, although it’s no defence. It’s a plausible if, and only if, you have internalised the assumption that women are not real human beings, just bodies to be manipulated with or without consent, pieces of wet and willing meat there for you to use for your pleasure. There’s a word for what happens when one group of people sees another as less than human and insists on its right to hurt and humiliate them for fun. It’s an everyday word that is often misused to refer to something outside of ourselves. The word is ‘evil’.
Laurie Penny is simply devastating on the subject of Steubenville. Please take the time to read the whole thing in the New Statesman. However the overall positive message of her thesis could use a little underscoring. Abu Ghraib, after all, is what turned the tide of public opinion about the Iraq war. Penny is saying that in spite of the tragedy of Steubenville, the widespread scandal and outrage has given us an unprecedented opportunity to raise awareness about rape culture. Already I’ve seen and heard the term discussed in corners of the mainstream media where I’ve never heard it before, including CBC’s Q this morning in an interview about the media coverage of the Steubenville trial with Rachel Giese from the Walrus.
2 months ago
createourownlight:
I’ve never asked anyone to reblog anything before, and I probably won’t again. But I am now - because this matters.
The Steubenville rape victim, when offered money for her legal expenses or counselling, asked that people donated to a shelter for abused women and children in her county, Madden…
