February 2012
16 posts
5 tags
So please, instead of asking, “Why does she stay... →
Rihanna’s reaction is actually quite common amongst survivors of domestic violence. Eighty-five percent of women who are abused return to their abuser at some point, and many victims leave seven or eight times before they make a clean break. Unless you believe most women are weak or stupid, numbers that high should eliminate the “victims are weak or stupid” argument when trying to explain why they...
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Why Domestic Violence is Bigger Than Chris Brown →
It’s bigger than Chris Brown because he didn’t invent domestic violence. It’s bigger than Chris Brown because he isn’t responsible for hitting every woman that has ever been a victim of domestic violence. It’s bigger than Chris Brown because he won’t be the one to punch your sister, niece, aunt, mother, grandmother, or daughter.
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“The boom in images that turn women into sexual objects accompanied the sexual...”
– Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (via girlthatread)
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Under new legislation, women who want an abortion... →
The problem is not just that the woman and her physician (the relationship protected in Roe) no longer matter in deciding whether an abortion is proper. It is that the physician is being commandeered by the state to perform a medically unnecessary procedure upon a woman, despite clear ethical directives to the contrary. As the Virginian-Pilot put it, “Under any other circumstances, forcing an...
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After Spanish Proverb
Oh, mercifullest one of all, Oh, generous as dear, None lived so lowly, none so small, Thou couldst withhold thy tear: How swift, in pure compassion, How meek in charity, To offer friendship to the one Who begged but love of thee! Oh, gentle word, and sweetest said! Oh, tender hand, and first To hold the warm, delicious bread To lips burned black of thirst.
- Dorothy Parker
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Musée des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They...
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I'm Not OK with Chris Brown Performing at the... →
We – the grown-up influencers in this country, the people with platforms and with educations and with power — are allowing a clear message to be sent to women: We will easily forgive a person who victimizes you. We are able to look beyond the fact that you were treated as less than human, that a bigger, stronger person decided to resolve a conflict with you through violence. We know it happened,...
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Can We End Rape as a Tool of War? →
“Naming sexualized violence as a weapon of war makes it visible — and once visible, prosecutable. What happened to men in the past was political, but what happened to women was cultural. The political was public and could be changed; the other was private — even sacred — and could not or even should not be changed.
Making clear that sexualized violence is political and...
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The Story of a Suicide: Two college roommates, a... →
“It became widely understood that a closeted student at Rutgers had committed suicide after video of him having sex with a man was secretly shot and posted online. In fact, there was no posting, no observed sex, and no closet. But last spring, shortly before Molly Wei made a deal with prosecutors, Ravi was indicted on charges of invasion of privacy (sex crimes), bias intimidation (hate...
January 2012
3 posts
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"The scale and brutality of our prisons are the... →
Six million people are under correctional supervision in the US. More than were in Stalin’s gulags… Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write.
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December 2011
3 posts
3 tags
Pennsylvania Supreme Court rules that saying a...
wanderingdame:
[Source]
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Is pubic hair coming back into fashion? →