There was broad consensus at the forum that the backlash against women’s rights is fiercer than ever right now. Sarah Martin, a gender-based violence specialist with nearly 20 years experience in the field as a humanitarian, said it is no longer sufficient to simply fight for new ground.

Women’s movements are the only way women have ever won rights.

The vote. The right to choose. The right to work. To open bank accounts. To marry who we choose. To be free from harassment. These rights have only ever been achieved by movements led by women to make it so.

https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/eds-blog/a-few-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-global-fight-for-womens-rights/

For generations of girls, “Our Bodies, Ourselves” was the starter pack to adulthood: It let you know whether your vulva was weird looking (it wasn’t), what kind of birth control you might want to use and whether you were the only one who had a special relationship with your pillow. (You weren’t, Page 162 assured.)

But after nearly 50 years, Our Bodies Ourselves, the Boston nonprofit home of the book, will stop publishing the pubescent tome amid a period of “transition.” The book, last updated in 2011, will no longer have new editions. The nonprofit organization housing their programmatic work — they reported $279,460 in revenue for its 2016 fiscal year — will now be led by volunteers.

That the foundational feminist text will cease to publish at this particular time seems strange. Trump’s inauguration was dwarfed by millions of women wearing “pussy hats”; abusive men across every industry are being outed by #MeToo; women in film, television and music are embracing the feminist label with gusto.

But feminist nonprofits, especially those founded during the movement’s second wave heyday, aren’t thriving in a way that reflects the moment. Stalwarts like the National Organization for Women and Ms. magazine still exist. But their profiles dwindle in the shadow of newer endeavors like Times Up, or Teen Vogue’s recent political makeover.

“Our Bodies, Ourselves” has “always been a labor of love,” Ms. Childers said, but perhaps that’s part of the problem. Even as women’s work and activism has completely changed lives and shifted the direction of the country, we still have largely been expected to do it for little to no money, with women’s nonprofits relying on pure passion and urgent need.

As feminism becomes more and more culturally powerful, guiding voices with experience will be more important ever. The more mainstreamed feminism becomes, the easier it is to water down the values of the movement.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/style/our-bodies-ourselves-book-publishing.html?

When the model Sophia Hadjipanteli accidentally tinted her blond eyebrows black, she decided to show off her non-normative body hair, rather than reach for the wax strips. It has worked wonders for her career.

[S]he is an example of how female body hair in the mainstream is still confined to gimmick and novelty, only acceptable if your appearance conforms to beauty standards in every other respect.

Truly hairy women do not have the option of making peace with a peach-fuzz of leg hair; they would be laughed at if they did not rise to the gruelling, expensive task of hair removal.

I now realise that the white girl vanguard is not helping hairier women to feel normal and desirable in their natural state. All body hair is equal, but some body hair is more equal than other body hair. Excuse me if I don’t rejoice in Hadjipanteli’s popularity; it is just that natural hairiness will not be reclaimed until it is reclaimed for all women.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/apr/09/can-model-monobrow-help-women-embrace-body-hair-sophia-hadjipanteli?

Shortly after the close of this year’s International Women’s Day, China’s Twitter-like service Sina Weibo shut down Feminist Voices. With 180,000 followers, the group’s social media account was one of the most important advocacy channels for spreading information about women’s issues in China, but in an instant, it was gone. A few hours later, the private messaging app WeChat also shuttered an account for the group. The official reasons for the closures were vague, simply that the accounts had posted content that violated regulations, but the subtext was clear: the country’s highly-monitored media was trying to silence women’s advocates.

Days after it went dark, images appeared online of a group of masked women holding a symbolic funeral for the death of Feminist Voices. Yet the group’s founder Lu Pin (now based in the US) wrote on Twitter that she viewed the ritual not as a funeral, but as a “fantastic carnival,” signifying a rebirth, and she pledged to “reclaim the account by every legal avenue.”

“Keeping the movement going will be challenging, but these feminists are tenacious and extremely determined. The Chinese government can’t wipe out the women’s movement in this era of global connectivity.”

https://www.wired.com/story/china-feminism-emoji-censorship/