(*)The title of this blog post is taken from a (NSFW) tumblr.
I spent yesterday at Fem11, the feminist conference organised by UK Feminista. It was great to be in a room with a thousand other feminists, and you know your event is successful when the hashtag on Twitter attracts both trolls and spammers. Sessions at the conference covered a wide variety of subjects, from violence against women, through abortion and the plight of asylum seekers. As usual, I wished there were two of me so I could attend more of the sessions.
There were a few themes through the day, but the one that really struck me was around sexualisation, objectification and the sex industry. The opening session had Cllr Rania Khan speaking about her campaign against lapdancing clubs, Isabella Woolford Diaz telling us about tackling lads’ mags in Tesco, and Bjorn Suttka introducing the Anti-Porn Men Project. The absolutely packed workshop on ending violence against women covered a lot of ground, including exploring the role of sexualisation and objectification of women in creating an environment conducive to violence against women.
(Source: thehotmesshomo)
You know how men want sex all the time whereas women just want diamonds and babies? It turns out that if you look closely at the science behind these claims, a lot of gender differences disappear. A new review of existing research by psychologists at the University of Michigan deconstructs six common Mars/Venus claims.
(Source: boomvagynamite)
(Source: straightfromscarbz)
“We gotta demand pay that reflects the job you do not whether you got a dick or not.”
The study’s other main finding is that a woman generally needs more degrees than a man in order to earn the same amount of money. For example, the average woman must obtain a Ph.D in order to keep pace with the average bachelor’s degree-holding man.
“The women’s story is grand and dismal,” concluded Carnevale. After scanning all 171 majors included in the study, he found not one major where women consistently out-earn men.
The report also found similar gaps by ethnicity and race. For instance, African Americans and Latinos earn less money than their white peers — even those whites with less education. Further, the average African American or Latino with a master’s degree doesn’t exceed the lifetime earnings of white bachelor’s degree holder. Finally, the report concluded that Asian Americans with graduate degrees earn more than all other races, including whites.
Do They Really Believe Abortion Is Murder? (via Alas! A Blog):
A lot of “pro-lifers” say that they believe that an abortion, even early in pregnancy, is identical to child murder. Have an abortion, shoot a four-year-old in the head; morally, it’s the same. Or, anyhow, that’s what they claim to believe.
In contrast, pro-choicers tend to think that the abortion criminalization movement is motivated by a desire – perhaps an unconscious desire – to punish women for having sex.
I used to reject that latter view as a pointless ad hominem attack. Nowadays, I’m not so sure. Although I’ve met some rank-and-file pro-lifers whose policy preferences were consistent with a belief that a fetus is morally indistinguishable from a child, those folks usually have policy preferences which are totally out of step with the abortion criminalization movement as a whole.
In contrast, the leaders of the abortion criminalization movement have consistently put their political weight behind policies which make little or no sense if they genuinely think that abortion is identical to child murder. And those same leaders routinely endorse policies that make a lot of sense if their goal is to punish women who have sex.
To be fair, this is never phrased as “punishing” women by pro-lifers; what I’ve heard again and again from pro-lifers is that women should be made to “take responsibilityfor their actions” (by “actions,” they mean having sex), or that abortion is wrong because it lets women “avoid the consequences.”
So what motivates pro-lifers: the belief that women should be forced to face consequences for having sex, or the belief that abortion is exactly like child murder?
This table is spot-on in so many cases.
Aaah fucking big pharma. It’s about time we have a viable birth control method that men can employ (other than condoms), but noooo let’s not fund this valuable research because it just doesn’t make us enough money…
