This post on his family’s Facebook page came on the heels of an InTouch article revealing that Josh Duggar had confessed to his father, Jim Bob, that younger Duggar had molested several girls, reportedly including his sisters, when he was 15 years-old.

In my own Facebook post, I asked the question, “Isn’t molestation a form of sexual assault, and isn’t sexual assault a crime?” I wondered how and why Josh Duggar’s actions could be downgraded from “crimes” to “wrongdoing” and “very bad mistakes.” It seemed to me that Duggar’s perverse actions were being minimized. Several of my friends commented that Josh’s parents had protected him from criminal punishment.

In the state of Arkansas, where the Duggars lived in 2006, first, second, and third degree sexual assault are felonies. Instead of facing the legal system for his deplorable offenses, Duggar received “God’s kindness, goodness, and forgiveness,” in his parents’ words, or “God’s grace, mercy, and redemption,” in his own words.


Read more: http://www.forharriet.com/2015/05/how-white-male-privilege-allowed-josh.html#ixzz3bTPUHoke

How do you explain that the leading cause of death of women aged 15 to 19, worldwide, is suicide? An internationally recognized expert on global mental health and suicide said in an interview with the Telegraph: “The most probable reason is gender discrimination.”

In other words, misogyny kills.

There are plenty of shocking statistics in a recently rediscovered 2014 study on suicide from the World Health Organization. The report found that suicides are responsible for half of all violent deaths in men and 71% of violent deaths in women. It also showed that globally, suicide is the second leading cause of death for all young people between the ages of 15 and 29 years old. Yet, somehow, it took us until now to notice just how badly it affects young women.

It was Dr Suzanne Petroni, the senior director for gender, population and development at the International Center for Research on Women, who first realized the chilling statistic as she was going through a WHO special report on adolescents. In a section on how maternal mortality has dropped, there was almost a throwaway line: “[M]aternal mortality ranks second among causes of death of 15–19-year old girls globally, exceeded only by suicide.”

Petroni called a friend at the WHO to make sure the stat was correct and then dug a little deeper: she found that not only had suicide taken over maternal mortality as the top cause of death for adolescent girls, but she told me: “it was clear that from at least 2000 it was a leading cause of death in this age group”.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/28/worldwide-sexism-increases-suicide-risk-in-young-women

Despite the era’s prudish, repressed reputation, the Victorians loved a good craze — the weirder, the better. Well-to-do men and women alike found themselves gripped by fashionable momentary obsessions with novelties, from blue-and-white porcelain to orchids to roller skates to spiritual seances. When the late 1870s brought the so-called “Ordinary” or penny farthing bicycle (the epitome of an old-timey bike, with a front wheel many times larger than the rear) into the public eye, the comical-looking contraption was a sensation.

Bicycle mania swept the nation, and the advent of the more manageable “Safety” bicycle — named for its relative safety compared to the high-wheeled penny farthing — meant that even women could get in on the fun. While today it seems completely natural to hop a bike and hit the road, the advent of the bicycle had a hugely liberating (and controversial) impact on women’s lives; for the first time, there was a way for them to leave their houses and embrace their own autonomy without facing social suicide.

A woman born during the Victorian era had precious few options. Middle- and upper-class ladies were expected to marry, give birth to babies (preferably boys), entertain guests, and keep a respectable household — that’s it. A proper lady’s place was in the home, where she whiled away her days strapped into a suffocating corset and cumbersome hoop skirt, minding the servants, popping out children, and serving as an ornamental object for her (hopefully rich) husband to either cossett or ignore as it suited him. Women weren’t meant to exercise their bodies or their minds, which led to generations of frail creatures whose lives were governed by fainting spells and striving for an arsenic-white complexion, no matter how much they secretly yearned to write or debate or explore.

Those who ran afoul of these social conventions ran considerable risk of ostracization and/or "spinsterhood" — a fate which, back then, meant a life of poverty and loneliness. However, once the bicycle entered the picture, all of these bored, idle housewives and daughters were suddenly given a safe, respectable route out of their velvet prisons. They grabbed those handlebars like drowning people straining towards life preservers. As an 1896 issue of Munsey’s Magazine explained, "To men, the bicycle...was merely a new toy, another machine added to the long list of devices they knew in their work and play. To women, it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world."
http://www.refinery29.com/women-victorian-era-society-bike-riding

Seventeen years after Viagra, the blockbuster anti-impotency pill, hit the market, not a single medicine has been formally approved for sexual problems in women.

Now, the makers of a drug that purports to boost a woman’s libido by targeting her brain are launching their third attempt to win American government approval, amid a debate over whether there has been a gender bias in the high-stakes field of sexual pharmacology — or a manufactured cure for a medical disease that may not exist.

Next week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will hold a public hearing to review new safety data for flibanserin, a once-a day drug Sprout Pharmaceuticals says restores sexual desire in women by “fixing” an imbalance of brain chemicals that drive sexual excitement and inhibition.

Twice the FDA has rebuffed flibanserin, dubbed “pink Viagra,” over safety and efficacy concerns, leading to charges that the agency is sexist for approving sexual medicines for men, but not for women. Other women’s groups are furious for what they see as a hijacking of feminist rhetoric by drug-company orchestrated campaigns designed to put political pressure on regulators to approve a pill for a “hypoactive” sex drive.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/drug-to-boost-womens-sex-drive-struggles-for-government-approval-as-debate-rages-over-need-for-it#__federated=1

Young women looking to learn more about the feminist wave without wordy articles and extensive think pieces, look no further.

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Freelance illustrator, Ellen T. Crenshaw took cartoons to another level when she contributed to The Nib‘s “We Are Entitled To Wear Cowboy Boots To Our Own Revolution” series, featuring quotes from 10 women in American history who spoke on gender equality and serve as some of the countless faces of feminism.

The cartoonists’ work spotlights powerful words from Sojourner Truth in 1851, to Coretta Scott King’s support of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 1994, to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s infamous TEDx talk “We Should All Be Feminists,” in 2012. Other notables made into caricatures include Malala Yousafzai, Beyoncé, Jessica Valenti (feminist writer), Faith Whittlesey (politician), Naomi Wolf (author), and Bette Davis (actress) with their thoughts on power, language, and women’s rights.
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Scroll through the gallery above to get your dose of woman power through Crenshaw’s beautiful illustrations.

Dear Editors and Founders of Rabble.ca

We write to you because we are disturbed by your response to the recent smear campaigns against Rabble contributor, writer, and fellow leftist Meghan Murphy.

We are disappointed in your statement regarding the attacks and the petitions against Meghan. It is troubling that Rabble repeated the libelous claims made about Meghan rather than making a fulsome defense of her right to hold or present opinions critical of the sex industry and its apologists. We note that your statement gives an inordinate amount of attention to appeasing those maligning Meghan.

Attacking Meghan for using her platform to present feminist analysis and critique has the effect of squashing and threatening those whose voices she reflects. As women of colour and indigenous feminists, we are more aware than ever that our dissent is not welcome by Rabble. Your tyrannical enforcement of neo-liberal ideals is to the detriment of women of colour and indigenous women working to end racism, sexism and colonialism in the midst of overwhelming poverty imposed on us by unfettered capitalism and imperialist agendas. We expect more openness, democratic practice and intellectual rigour from you who pride yourselves as progressives and who lay claim to alliance with the oppressed.

Pornography and pop culture portray Indigenous women as “squaws”, Asian women as “geishas”, and Black women as being animalistic – available for any kind of sex with anybody at all times. These profitable and easily consumable images serve to further marginalize racialized women as these oversimplified tropes are turned into commodities to be exchanged through monetary transaction, and thus fuelling a particular demand for these women, who already have very limited choices, in prostitution. Indigenous women, Asian women and Black women are immersed in racialized sexism in our society. The idea of giving “equal opportunity” to all women to be objectified will not help end racism or sexism. In fact, such fetishizing has highly negative consequences particularly for poor, working class women of colour.
http://awcep.org/news/open-letter-rabbleca

(CNN)A new study about the incidence of rape involving college freshmen women will likely add to the ongoing debate about whether enough is being done on campuses to keep students safe.

The study, conducted at a large unnamed private university in upstate New York and published in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that 19% of women, nearly one in five, said they had been a victim of attempted or completed rape, either by force or while they were incapacitated due to alcohol or drugs, during their freshman year.

"What this says to me is a lot of our young women are dealing with this sexual violence and we all probably know young women" who have been victims, said lead author Kate Carey, professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University's School of Public Health.

The study, conducted by researchers at Brown and Miriam Hospital's Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine, involved surveys with 483 first-year women who ranged in age from 18 to 21.

They were recruited to take part in a survey about women's health and answered questions on a range of issues including alcohol consumption, suicidal ideations and sexual behavior. They recorded their responses before they started their first year, and at the end
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/20/living/feat-rape-freshmen-women-new-study/

The idea that this was specifically a Men’s Rights crusade was, to be sure, a bit of sloppiness on the part of the journalists writing about it, who are not quite as familiar as some of us are with all the different varieties of woman-hating shitheads there are in the “manosphere” — especially since their belief systems overlap considerably. As I noted in a previous post on this subject, writing about Esmay’s accusations against a writer for the Huffington Post,

It’s true that the HuffPo writer, in the original version of her piece, wrongly described the MRA-adjacent Return of Kings — which has urged a boymancott of Mad Max Fury Road — as a Men’s Rights site proper. There are in fact some differences between ROK and AVFM. For example, while AVFM writers have declared women to be “obnoxious cunts,” who control men with their vaginas, ROK writers have suggested that women are actually depraved, disloyal sheep.

You can almost forgive journalists for getting a bit mixed up.

Meanwhile, it’s clear that some MRAs, including some associated with AVFM, have views on the movie that bear a striking similarity to those of Mr. Clarey and his comrades at ROK. It was an AVFM staffer, not Aaron Clarey, who posted this meme on AVFM’s Facebook page. (It’s since been removed, possibly because it contradicts the narrative that Esmay is now promoting.)

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And if you want many other example of MRAs saying they won’t go to see the film because feminism, you’ll find more than a few in this thread on the Men’s Rights subreddit. Oh, and in this thread (archived here) on … the official AVFM Forum.

Yes, that’s right: there are MRAs talking about boycotting Mad Max: Fury Road on AVFM’s own official forum. One declares himself “a (former) Mad Max fan,” another writes “going to skip this one. Mad Max is now dead to me.” “I’m out,” adds a third.

http://wehuntedthemammoth.com

What the study found was staggering: 100% of the 60 women of color who were interviewed reported experiencing gender bias in the workplace. Moreover, they experience a kind of double-dipped, double helping of biases based on both their gender and their race. They all shared experiences of discrimination in all forms, both subtle (micro-agressions) and overt.

The study highlights these staggering statistics:

100% of the women interviewed reported gender bias.
Black women are more likely (77%) than other women (66%) to report having to prove themselves over and over again.
The stereotype that Asians are good at science appears to help Asian-American women with students—but not with colleagues.
Asian-Americans reported both more pressure than other groups of women to adhere to traditionally feminine roles and more pushback if they don’t.
Latinas who behave assertively risk being seen as “angry” or “too emotional,” even when they report they weren’t angry; they just weren’t deferential.
Latinas report being pressured by colleagues to do admin support work for their male colleagues, such as organizing meetings and filling out forms.
Both Latinas and Black women report regularly being mistaken as janitors.

http://www.themarysue.com/women-of-color-stem/

Furious about Furiosa: Misogynists are losing it over Charlize Theron’s starring role in Mad Max: Fury Road

Well, the manly men of the Manospshere are having none of it. On the always terrible Return of Kings, the most-trafficked blog in the Manosphere, Youtube bloviator Aaron Clarey issues a clarion call to his fellow right-thinking men, urging them to

Not only REFUSE to see the movie, but spread the word to as many men as possible. … Because if [men] sheepishly attend and Fury Road is a blockbuster, then you, me, and all the other men (and real women) in the world will never be able to see a real action movie ever again that doesn’t contain some damn political lecture or moray about feminism, SJW-ing, and socialism.

Er, “moray?”

As Clarey sees it, the central flaw in this film that he hasn’t seen is, well, it’s going to be starring Charlize Theron as a shaven-headed postapocalyptical badass named Furiosa. And that’s just not right, because everyone knows that women are just too damn womeny to be postapocalyptical badasses.

Even worse: in one of the trailers for the film “Charlize Theron’s character barked orders to Mad Max. Nobody barks orders to Mad Max.”

Clarey also reports, with a kind of growing horror, that none other than Eve Ensler, of Vagina Monologues fame, was brought in to consult on the film. (And trust me, Clarey’s discomfort with Ensler has nothing to do with her issues with intersectionality.)

Sure, Clarey acknowledges, Fury Road — at least on the surface — “looks like that action guy flick we’ve desperately been waiting for where it is one man with principles, standing against many with none.” But, he warns, despite not having actually seen even a minute of the actual film, nothing could be further from the truth!
http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/05/12/furious-about-furiosa-misogynists-are-losing-it-over-charlize-therons-starring-role-in-mad-max-fury-road/