Feminist Friday: In Case People Still Wondered Why Feminism And #YesAllWomen Are Needed

Lots to talk about here. If you have a few minutes today, I encourage you to read and join in this discussion.

Natacha Guyot

For the past months, I have participated in several Feminist Friday discussions about a wide range of topics, witha fewotherbloggers. Last week, the focus was on the Feminist label itself. As I commented, I think that the label is still needed and I have called myself a feminist for many years, no matter how many times I have to explain again and clarify that I am not a man hater or assorted negative clichés. (I am not saying that some people calling themselves feminists haven’t gone to such extremes, but that is a problem with many labels. Negative branches of a label can easily taint the whole tree, but it doesn’t mean the other branches have to change using said label).

Earlier this week, I came across a Tumblr post (which I reblogged) that featured pictures and shared a link to the following article: Disturbing…

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Living In America: Living With RapeCulture

This is too good, and too important, not to reblog. It’s an important contribution to our conversation for two reasons: It’s very specific about the consequences of rape and rape culture in the U.S., and it addresses an issue that we deal with regularly – the idea that, for whatever reason, we just shouldn’t talk about it. I’m a little behind because I had something personal going on that kept me offline all day yesterday. At the moment, my plan is to get caught up with comments later this afternoon, and spend some time tomorrow catching up with those of you who tweet with me. Thanks for keeping this going in my absence.

Drifting Through

“Me and a gun
and a man
On my back
But I haven’t seen Barbados
So I must get out of this
Yes I wore a slinky red thing
Does that mean I should spread
For you, your friends your father, Mr. Ed”

-Tori Amos, Me and A Gun

My daughter used to play a game when she was a baby. She would crawl over to our magazine rack and tear up the pages. When I would say something to stop her, she would cover her eyes. She thought, in her adorable baby brain, that if she covered her eyes we couldn’t see it therefore nothing was happening. We laughed each time she did this. We marveled at the simple naiveté of a small child. We thought it was precious. But you know what’s not precious? When adults do it. When we do it. When society does it. When we…

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Feminist Friday Round Three: Rape

This weekend we are discussing sexual assault against women.

First, let’s look at the global picture. Here’s an map from womanstats.org, via Shards of Silence. You can follow them both on Twitter@WomanStats and @shardsofsilence

I’m not sure exactly how this scale was constructed, but I did spend the better part of my evening on Wednesday looking at the womanstats codebook, and just in general, pulling their website apart. I am satisified that they are actually measuring rape here, and this map raises a lot of questions.