#GirlsCan: Women Empowerment | COVERGIRL: Girls can’t? Yes, they can. Rap, be funny, be off-the-wall, rock, be strong, run the show, make the world a little more easy, breezy and beautiful. (x)
#TheHomelessPeriod exposes the unique menstruation problem homeless women face
The new campaign shines a light on homeless women who need assistance caring for their menstrual cycles. According to the Guardian, approximately 26% of people in the U.K. who receive “homelessness services” are female. But in most shelters, “sanitary ware or any kind of period ephemera is scarce,” Vice reported earlier this year. Three women have a plan to fix that.
The Myth of the Extraordinary Woman doesn’t challenge sexism. Having one female character in a group of male characters who deserves to be there because she “earned their respect” by “being the best” does NOTHING to threaten the patriarchy, because it’ll just isolate her as an aberrant case. MOST women are useless, but THIS ONE is special.
You know what does threaten the patriarchy? Communities of women. Older female mentors taking younger ones under their wing. Presenting a united front to sexism. Women who don’t even WANT to join the boy’s club, who seek the approval of other women, and value THEIR opinions over gatekeeping sexists.
"Excuse me, could you show me where to find the plays about queer women?"
The problem:
It’s the theatre world’s open secret: queer women are noticeably absent from American stages. Despite break-out hits like this season’s Bright Half Life and the Pulitzer nominee Fun Home, representation in the theatre for queer women lags dramatically behind…
“
We have a major, flagrant, unsubtle problem in our culture and its media, where the representation of women is concerned. We’re assured time and time again that all the goddamn male action heroes, male writers, male directors, male casts, male-focused story elements, etc. are the result of some purely emotionless, rational decision-making in the impeccably clean Laboratories of Capitalism, but the plain fact is that dollars from women are simply worth less to most of the entertainment industry than dollars from men, even though they’re the exact same dollars. Period.
Male characters are allowed by the audience to be complex, shifting, mercurial, angry, emotional, manipulative, demanding, and troublesome. Female characters given the same multi-faceted psychological treatment are harshly criticized as being faithless, annoying bitches. I have already begun to see a review here and there in this vein concerning Sabetha… and as near as I can tell, they have all been written by female readers. Ponder that, if you haven’t already been forced to ponder it all your life… girls are brought up to detest themselves and their own human potential for complexity. They’re being trained to fervently hate female characters who don’t serve as unwavering support mechanisms for male characters. They’re being trained to hate themselves.
The older I get the angrier I get about this. The more I write the more I try to address it. […] The whole situation depresses me because of the obvious implications for human rights and dignity. […]
I will happily try to put something for everyone in my work, and write to represent and please all sexes and persuasions, and try to give everyone moments of prominence, achievement, heroism, and agency. Of course, I also try to give everyone moments of weakness, failure, and villainy. Writing with an eye on equality means you grant everyone the chance to be a rounded human portrait, to be evil as well as good, to be reviled as well as idealized.
”Scott Lynch (via joannalannister)
Hillary Clinton isn’t a champion of women’s rights - she’s the embodiment of corporate feminism
Assuming Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016, much of her popular support will be based on her image as an advocate of women’s rights. During her 2008 candidacy, the National Organization of Women (NOW) endorsed Clinton based on her “long history of support for women’s empowerment.”
A group of 250 academics and activists calling themselves “Feminists for Clinton” praised her “powerful, inspiring advocacy of the human rights of women” and her “enormous contributions” as a policymaker.
Since then, NOW and other mainstream women’s organizations have been eagerly anticipating her 2016 candidacy. Clinton and supporters have recently stepped up efforts to portray her as a champion of both women’s and LGBT rights.
Such depictions have little basis in Clinton’s past performance. While she has indeed spoken about gender and sexual rights with considerable frequency, and while she may not share the overtly misogynistic and anti-LGBT views of most Republican politicians, as a policymaker she has consistently favored policies devastating to women and LGBT persons.
Why, then, does she continue to enjoy such support from self-identified feminists? Part of the answer surely lies in the barrage of sexist attacks that have targeted her and the understandable desire of many feminists to see a woman in the Oval Office.
But that’s not the whole story. We suggest that feminist enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton is reflective of a profound crisis of US liberal feminism, which has long embraced or accepted capitalism, racism, empire, and even heterosexism and transphobia.
All issues of wealth, power, and violence are also women’s and LGBT rights issues. For instance, neoliberal economic policies of austerity and privatization disproportionately hurt women and LGBT individuals, who are often the lowest paid and the first workers to be fired, the most likely to bear the burdens of family maintenance, and the most affected by the involuntary migration, domestic violence, homelessness, and mental illness that are intensified by poverty.
A Jihadist extremist told this female Lebanese news anchor to shut up, so she cut off his microphone.
Karaki was interviewing Hani Al-Seba’i about the phenomenon of Christians joining Islamic groups like ISIS. Al-Seba’i is a Sunni scholar who fled to London after he was sentenced in an Egyptian court to 15 years in prison for being a part of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The United Nations considers the group to be an affiliate of al Qaeda.
But despite Al-Seba’i’s extreme ties, Karaki didn’t back down when he disrespected her on Al-Jadeed TV after she politely tried to redirect his historical tangent. Instead of taking his guff, she cut off his microphone when she decided she’d had enough.
“In many parts of the world, [it is] more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier.”
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the head of U.N. Women