mohandasgandhi:

janedoe225:

One way that psychologists have found to test whether something is seen as an object is by turning it upside down. Pictures of people present a recognition problem when they’re turned upside down, but pictures of objects don’t have that problem. So Bernard and his colleagues used a test where they presented pictures of men and women in sexualized poses, wearing underwear. Each participant watched the pictures appear one by one on a computer screen. Some of the pictures were right side up and some were upside down. After each picture, there was a second of black screen, then the participant was shown two images. They were supposed to choose the one that matched the one they had just seen.

People recognized right-side-up men better than upside-down men, suggesting that they were seeing the sexualized men as people. But the women in underwear weren’t any harder to recognize when they were upside down—which is consistent with the idea that people see sexy women as objects. There was no difference between male and female participants.

And yet another study with this conclusion….

fuckyeahfeminists:

Gloria Steinem [x]

rdrandomthoughts:

Placards at the Rally To Take Rape Seriously by WeNews on Flickr.

Placards at the Rally To Take Rape Seriously

We attended NOW-NYC’s Take Rape Seriously Rally to protest the disappointing sentence Tony Simmons received after confessing to raping three teenage girls.

Find out more about this case and the treatment of rape in the courts at Women’s eNews

N.Y. Case Shows Lenient Treatment of Rapists
womensenews.org/story/rape/110121/ny-case-shows-lenient-t…

fuckyeahfeminists:

A staggering one in three Native American women will be raped in their lifetime—three and a half times the national average. The law Iyotte testified about was designed to cut through the jurisdictional red tape that too often allowed rapists to go unchecked. It also requires the federal Indian Health Service (IHS)—which runs or oversees most reservation-based clinics, hospitals and mobile units—to create and adopt standard sexual assault policies based on those used by the U.S. Department of Justice.

In a new roundtable report by the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center (NAWHERC), more than 50 indigenous sexual assault and domestic violence advocates from Albuquerque, Oklahoma, New Mexico and South Dakota say that IHS hasn’t held up its end of the law.

Organizers need help bringing awareness to this issue. Click the title to read more about the fight for Plan B and what you can do to help.

Sometimes I hear people say that racism/sexism/etc in culture isn’t important or worth criticizing. ”Oh it’s just a book,” they say. ”It’s just a crappy TV show.” ”It’s just a commercial.”

This argument always baffles me. It’s like if you put poison into a fish-tank and then say “Oh well I didn’t poison the fish, I just poisoned the water.” The fish lives in the water, dumbass; it’s completely submerged in and surrounded by the water. I’m pretty sure that poisoned water is going to affect the fish.

Similarly, we all live constantly immersed in this miasma of information that we call “culture.” People are not born prejudiced. We don’t emerge from the womb knowing that all black men are scary thugs, that all Latinas are spicy sexpots, that all Indians are violent savages, that all women are weepy and frail, that all gay men are depraved pedophiles, and that all people in wheelchairs are objects of pity. We learn these things, usually starting at a very young age, and we often learn them from our culture — the books we read, the movies we watch, and the constant barrage of advertising that we don’t really pay attention to but which still manages to seep into our brains, and which shapes the way we think about the world, for better or for worse.

If you want to save the fish, you need to purify the water.

brownhistory:

Rigoberta Menchu #BrownHistory Tribute Design

karnythia:

So let me get this straight, when white girls dye their hair 987 colors at the same time that’s punk, or couture, or avant garde. But when black girls get wild weaves then that’s ghetto, or hood rat, or tacky & it’s their fault for wearing their hair that way if they didn’t want to be mocked. Really? See this is that internalized shit that we need to clean out of our minds. You don’t have to like it to support someone else’s right to wear it. Or to understand that black women don’t have to live up to arbitrary standards to be worthy of some measure of protection.

This “ghetto” black woman costume that gets played in so many communities for laughs (see black comedians like Eddie Murphy & Martin Lawrence, Tyler Perry’s Madea character, & Shirley Q. Liquor for some big name examples) isn’t about praising black women. Or celebrating us, or whatever other dumb shit someone is going to say. It’s about policing us & presenting us to the public as something to mock. And yes, I know the pretty slim black girl love interest is a common trope in these movies, but that doesn’t negate the message being sent about older/larger black women. It doesn’t negate the erasure of actual older/larger black women from the public eye & it certainly does harm actual black women.

You remember us right? We exist at all levels & all sizes in all kinds of ways. Want to present nuanced views of blackness? Great. That means including all kinds of black women. Hard concept for some folks I know, but we’re real live people, not costumes and you don’t get to play dress up in our lives. Any of our lives. Don’t like that? Trust & believe that I don’t care. Go tell it to the Lord, he might listen, but I’m not about to let open season continue on any black girls. No one gets a pass, not white people, not black people, not other non black POC, no one gets to attack black women for existing any more. Get right or get gone.

get involved

www.now.org
www.rawa.org
www.womenslaw.org
www.amnestyusa.org
www.globalissues.org
www.globalfundforwomen.org

bitchslap-barbie:

notsodarling-:

This is a joke, right? Seriously? Now we’re on par with farm animals? Fucking a.

Oh. My. God.

This state is falling apart. 

I actually had a conversation with DH the other day, asked him to think about moving somewhere else since things were going so far backwards so quickly. This is… there is NO REASON for this. This isn’t insensitivity. It’s an asshole exercising power because he can. 

WTF is happening??

sexxxisbeautiful:

TW Discussion of Rape/Violence and Suicide

thedailywhat:

This Is All Kinds Of Wrong of the Day: Calls for the reform of Morocco’s penal code were sparked over the weekend as news spread of a teenage girl who had committed suicide after being compelled to marry her rapist.

In Morocco, a rapist can “opt out” of a prison term by marrying his victim, so long as the victim and their family agree. Despite this clause, many say victims are often strong-armed into marriages they want no part of.

16-year-old Amina Filali’s father, Lahcen, blamed the marriage on pressure from the courts. “The prosecutor advised my daughter to marry,” he told the online news site goud.ma. “He said: ‘Go and make the marriage contract’.”

According to Amina’s mother, the girl complained on more than one occasion that her husband/rapist was beating her, but was advised to be patient. On Saturday, Amina could no longer take the abuse, and made the decision to end her own life by swallowing rat poison.

Moroccan woman, galvanized by Amina’s tragic death, have taken to the streets and launched petitions to demand that criminal law be changed to make it explicit that rapists cannot be allowed to marry their victims.

Moroccan law is known for being relatively female-friendly, compared with the rest of North Africa. Despite this, nearly two-third of all Moroccan women experience violence in their lifetimes, and many attorneys are ignorant of recent pro-women reforms, such as the raising of the marriage age from 15 to 18.

[latimes / blogpost / photo: aljazeera.]

trudymade:

In Sunday’s New York Times