Eighty male students at Notre Dame University wrote an open letter in the school newspaper asking for a porn filter on the school’s Wi-Fi.
“This filter would send the unequivocal message that pornography is an affront to human rights and catastrophic to individuals and relationships. We are calling for this action in order to stand up for the dignity of all people, especially women,” the letter read. “The overwhelming majority of contemporary pornography is literally filmed violence against women — violence somehow rendered invisible by the context.”
“Pornography is prostitution through the lens of a camera, but more abusive. It exploits the men and women involved, advances a twisted narrative about human sexuality and harms those who consume it.”
Two more medical schools in Japan have admitted to systematic discrimination against female students this week, the latest institutional scandal to hit the industry after Tokyo Medical University was accused of rigging examination results to suppress the number of women in the student body.
Juntendo University and Kitasato University on Monday conceded that they had set different passing scores for female and male applicants in entrance exams, as well as prioritized male candidates. Female applicants were held to a different standard because “women mature faster mentally than men and their communication ability is also higher [when they take the entrance exam],” Juntendo University’s medical school dean said, according to Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. He added that “in some ways, this was a measure to help male applicants.”
In August, Tokyo Medical University was found to have manipulated exam scores to exclude female students for more than a decade, prompting backlash and a government investigation into entrance exam processes at medical schools across the country. An investigation found that the university had reduced all medical school applicants’ initial test scores by 20%, before inflating the scores of male applicants’ exams. The institution initially defended the policy by arguing that women were more likely to leave the medical profession to pursue motherhood, creating a staffing shortage in the sector.
Juntendo University President Hajime Arai apologized for the discriminatory testing practices, and Kitasato University’s officials have said they will introduce an external committee to address the issue.
The latest news of the academic discrimination comes amid government efforts to raise the profile of women in Japan’s workforce. As of 2017, women made up 43% of the laborers, according to the World Bank. In the same year, Japan ranked 114th out of 144 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report.
Despite Shinzo Abe’s pledge to create “a society in which all women shine,” the Japanese Prime Minister himself faced criticism in October after a reshuffle left only one woman in his 19-member cabinet.
“From the beginning, Cyntoia Brown’s life story has been heartbreaking. She was put up for adoption at the age of 2, and her life after that was a traumatic spiral of verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and substance abuse.
At the age of 16, she was sold as a sex-slave to a 43-year-old Nashville realtor—Johnny Mitchell Allan. She was subjected to more abuse by Allan, and in a documentary about her life, she described the abuse and how it made her paranoid.
In 2004, she was tried as an adult for killing Allen. She said she shot him because she feared he was going to kill her. During the trial, she said there was always a gun pointed on her during her captivity. She said she was hit, choked and dragged. She feared for her own life, and she acted out of that fear.
It didn’t matter. A jury convicted the then-16-year-old to life in prison. Under the then-Tennessee law, she would only be eligible for release after serving 51 years of her sentence.
The law in Tennessee has since changed. Now anyone 18 or younger cannot even be charged with prostitution, and that change in law came about because of Brown’s case. Still, it has done little to help Brown.”
“As in all war-torn societies, women suffer disproportionately. Afghanistan is still ranked the worst place in the world to be a woman. Despite Afghan government and international donor efforts since 2001 to educate girls, an estimated two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school. Eighty-seven percent of Afghan women are illiterate, while 70-80 percent face forced marriage, many before the age of 16. A September watchdog report called the USAID’s $280 million Promote program – billed the largest single investment that the U.S. government has ever made to advance women’s rights globally – a flop and a waste of taxpayer’s money.
Government statistics from 2014 show that 80 percent of all suicides are committed by women, making Afghanistan one of the few places in the world where rates are higher among women. Psychologists attribute this anomaly to an endless cycle of domestic violence and poverty. The 2008 Global Rights survey found that nearly 90 percent of Afghan women have experienced domestic abuse.”
Spain’s governing party wants to penalize clients and those who provide apartments for prostitution activities. The sex workers themselves would not be targeted in any way, as they would be regarded as victims. The bill is inspired by the abolitionist model pioneered by Sweden.
The new law seeks to disincentivize demand by outlawing the purchase of sex. It also considers human trafficking for sex exploitation to be a form of gender violence.
Modelling is one of the gateways to prostitution. Girls are groomed to self-objectify to please men.
“Nicole is a ‘mumager’ and her daughter has been modelling since she was six-years-old. She also manages her daughter’s social media pages.
'Monitoring the direct messages is like a full time job, deleting penis photos, marriage proposals, all sorts of disgusting comments,’ she told 10 daily.
She says one photographer 'convinced her’ to take a picture of her daughter with her pigtails covering her naked chest.”
A Washington State man in February texted to his friends pictures of a partially naked woman on his bed, according to police documents.
The man, Brian Varela, said in the texts that he believed that the woman was overdosing, but bragged that he had had sex with her and that he could do so again. Mr. Varela, who was 19 at the time, then started to play a video game, and fell asleep. When he woke up, the woman, Alyssa Noceda, 18, was dead.
On Thursday, Mr. Varela was sentenced to about three years in prison after he had pleaded guilty to felony charges that included second-degree manslaughter and third-degree rape.
The 34-month sentence was seen by members of Ms. Noceda’s family and others as woefully inadequate, and drew sharp complaints.
Indigenous women are roughly seven times more likely than non-indigenous women to be victims of serial homicide, according to a compiled international dataset of serial killings.
An official who agreed to a policy allowing male-bodied sex offenders into women’s prisons was a sex offender who hoarded 22,000 indecent pictures of children.
Gordon Pike, a senior official of the Scottish Prison Service, was one of those responsible for its “gender identity and gender reassignment policy”, documents seen by The Sunday Times show. The policy is significantly more liberal than England’s, stating that transgender prisoners must normally be housed according to the “social gender” with which they self-identify, “whether or not” they have legally changed it.
Two years after approving the policy, Pike, 57, was arrested at prison service headquarters in Edinburgh. Searching his home, police found 45 discs containing 22,100 indecent images of children, including 500 of “penetrative sexual activity” with minors. He was convicted of possession of sexual images of children in a trial ending last year and remains on the sex offenders’ register.
The prison policy, which also covers healthcare, is being used by a transgender sex offender and murderer, Paris Green, to make a 900-mile round trip from her Edinburgh prison to Sussex for private gender reassignment surgery, funded by taxpayers.
Green is serving life after she and two accomplices sexually assaulted a man with a rolling pin, tied him up, tortured him and beat him to death.
Born Peter Laing, Green identified as a woman in 2011, and was convicted two years later. Initially she was sent to a women’s jail but was moved back to a men’s wing after making advances to female prisoners.
Her surgery will be carried out at the private Nuffield hospital in Brighton, since there are no NHS facilities for it in Scotland. It will cost the NHS about £20,000, with the prison service facing a bill of up to £40,000 for transport and guarding during Green’s two-week stay.
The disclosure comes as new figures show there are 139 transgender prisoners in England and Wales, of whom 114 identify as female. Twenty-two, or 16%, were born male but are housed in women’s prisons. There are 18 transgender prisoners in Scotland, of whom 12, or two-thirds, were housed in or seeking transfers to women’s prisons.
Some 48% of transgender prisoners are sex offenders, the Ministry of Justice said in a freedom of information answer earlier this year, compared with less than 20% of the prison population as a whole.
They include Karen White, born Stephen Wood, a double rapist who was sent to New Hall women’s jail last year, where she assaulted two female prisoners. She was returned to a male jail after the assaults.
Jessica Winfield, born Martin Ponting, another double rapist put in a women’s prison, was reportedly segregated after she made advances to other inmates.
Gender surgeons and prison governors have said that some male-born sex offenders are transitioning in order to gain access to women prisoners, or to appear less dangerous in the hope of earlier parole.
Ministry of Justice figures show the number of women in prison for sex offences has risen by 40% in three years, from 93 in 2015 to 130 this year. The figures do not distinguish between biological women and trans women.
Women’s campaigners said it was highly likely that much of the increase was accounted for by male-born transgender sex offenders such as White and Winfield, who are counted as female in the statistics.
Nicola Williams, of Fair Play for Women, which has begun a parliamentary petition to change the policy, said: “These latest disclosures are deeply disturbing. MPs should be asking why the prison system is turning a blind eye to the abuse of women in its care.”
In December 2016, Pike pleaded guilty at Paisley sheriff court to possessing the images over a 10-year period. He avoided jail after claiming he was given the material by an unidentified caller to the LGBT Centre in Glasgow, where he was co-chairman. He said he had not viewed the images, though he knew what they were. He was sentenced to community punishment.
As “trade union side secretary” of the prison service, Pike was one of seven prison service officials named in prison documents as responsible for and then signing off the trans policy, which was published in 2014.
It states that “a male-to-female person in custody living permanently as a woman without genital surgery should be allocated to a female establishment. She should not be automatically regarded as posing a high sexual offence risk to other people in custody.”
A type of breast implant used by millions of women around the world is under scrutiny after French surgeons were advised to stop using it because of a potential link with a rare kind of cancer.
Textured breast implants have been linked with anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL), which forms in the scar capsule around the implant and normally begins with pain and swelling in the breast.
Women who have the implants and capsules removed can make a full recovery, but if left untreated the disease can spread throughout the body and become life-threatening.
There is growing concern about the effects of the implants, with figures collected by plastic surgeons suggesting there have been at least 615 cases of the disease associated with breast implants, and 16 deaths.
Lucy Parsons (1853 – 1942) was an American labor organizer, radical socialist and anarcho-communist. She is remembered as a powerful orator.
Parsons entered the radical movement following her marriage to newspaper editor Albert Parsons and moved with him from Texas to Chicago, where they co-wrote an anarchist newspaper called “The Alarm”.
Following her husband’s execution in 1887, Lucy Parsons remained a leading American radical activist, as a founder of the Industrial Workers of the World.
It is speculated that Parsons may have been born a slave, to parents of Native American, African American and Mexican ancestry. Lucy Parsons’ origins are not documented, and she told different stories about her background so it is difficult to sort fact from myth.
Described by the Chicago Police Department as “more dangerous than a thousand rioters” in the 1920s, Parsons had become highly effective as an anarchist organizer primarily involved in the labor movement in the late 19th century, but also participating in revolutionary activism on behalf of political prisoners, people of color, the homeless and women.
“Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.”
Today in my country (Italy) a bill against homophobic transphobic, ableist and sexist attacks (it’s called DDL zan) was shutted down by our senate (we already have one that protects poc people and people with different religious beliefs). The people cheering are the ones who voted against it, they were just 154. 2 people didn’t vote and 131 people agreed with this bill.
I feel really bad to say that I don’t feel safe in a country where the violation of human rights gets cheered as if it was a football match. Today those people that feel entitled to attack you because of your sexuality, your disability or your gender won, and all I have to say is that this country is a fucking joke and I really fucking hope that they’re happy to have just created a safe space for shitty people to feel even more entitled to discriminate against someone.
John Wayne tried to assault Sacheen Littlefeather at the 1973 Oscars. But let’s keep talking about how the “slapping incident” was the award show’s darkest moment ever.
“As she delivered the speech John Wayne was furious. She later said, “During my presentation, he was coming towards me to forcibly take me off the stage, and he had to be restrained by six security men to prevent him from doing so.”
Besides John Wayne’s abhorrent behavior other celebrities like Clint Eastwood, Raquel Welch and Michael Caine also piled on.
John Wayne quote is taken right from a Playboy interview.
Paula Akpan and Harriet Evans have launched the “I’m Tired” project to highlight the impact common microaggressions and stereotypes many face on a daily basis. By symbolically and literally carrying the aggressions on their backs, Apkan and Evans hope to help both the subjects and everyone else.
Janelle Monáe just came out publicly as nonbinary. She has now published The Memory Librarian, a collection of short stories written together with other authors, all set in the android universe presented in her EPs and albums.
Monáe presents androids as liberated beings threatening the status quo of a totalitarian society. It is not hard to see how they, their gender fluidity and their power of imagination helps us understand the liberating role of LGBTQA culture today.
They also help us understand why both right wing extremists and left wing transphobes do their best to stop them from freeing the world from the tyranny of sexism, racism and conformity.
Many of the characters are queer or nonbinary, including Seshet, who comes to love a trans woman named Alethia.
