Firefighters duct-taped a 17-year-old girl to a fire truck as part of a pattern of hazing during which she was also dragged by her hair and kicked at a rural Victorian Country Fire Authority brigade.
An investigation was launched after CCTV footage emerged in November showing the girl being dragged by her hair, kicked and left soaked by sprinklers by four middle-aged men.
Last Thursday 360 male leaders from business, politics, finance and entertainment gathered at The Dorchester hotel in London’s Mayfair donning tuxedos for a men’s only charity auction that has been held for the past 33 years.
The Presidents Club Charity Dinner is ostensibly a worthy annual event that has raised over 20 million pounds for charity but an undercover investigation has revealed there is a sleazy component to this supposedly ‘prestigious’ dinner.
Once the men were seated in the ballroom they were joined by the “entertainment” that came in the form of 130 young females hosts, dressed in skimpy black dresses and corset-like belts, who had been advised to wear high heels and matching underwear for the occasion.
The women were paraded out and then spread around the room for the viewing pleasure and titillation of the men. There was groping and harassment and inexplicable hand-holding, and propositioning.
https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/what-happens-at-an-exclusive-mens-only-charity-dinner/
Across the country, some police and prosecutors have brought criminal charges against teenagers for sending sexts, claiming it violates child pornography laws.
Sexting prosecutions are state-mandated slut shaming — and they come with serious consequences.
Production and possession of child pornography can carry a federal minimum sentence of 15 years. After prison, people convicted of sex offenses are placed on the sex-offender registry — making it nearly impossible to find a job, live in most areas, or go to college. Being on the sex offender registry will ruin a person’s life. That’s the sentence kids could face because some overzealous prosecutor objects to them sending a raunchy photo to their prom date.
It’s the same logic that leads district attorneys to throw rape survivors in jail to force them to testify: prosecutors say they’re punishing women and girls for their own good, as though they knew better. As though it’s worse for a young woman to send a completely consensual risque photo to her boyfriend than to end up on the sex offender registry.
http://feministing.com/2018/01/08/stop-pr osecuting-girls-for-sexting/
Virgin Trains has apologised after its official Twitter account compounded a customer’s complaint about sexist language by asking whether she would prefer to be called “pet” or “love”.
Emily Cole tweeted that she had been “dismissed with that hideously patronising word … honey” by a train manager, after attempting to discuss a problem.
Virgin Trains East Coast replied: “Sorry for the mess up Emily, would you prefer ‘pet’ or ‘love’ next time?”
Three leading figures in the Miss America Organization have resigned after leaked emails revealed how pageant officials ridiculed winners for their appearance, intellect and sex lives.
In late August 2014, the CEO of the Miss America Organization, Sam Haskell, sent an email to the lead writer of the Miss America pageant telecast, Lewis Friedman, informing him of a change he wanted to make in the script: “I have decided that when referring to a woman who was once Miss America, we are no longer going to call them Forever Miss Americas….please change all script copy to reflect that they are Former Miss Americas!”
Friedman replied, “I’d already changed “Forevers” to “Cunts.” Does that work for you?”
Haskell’s short reply came quickly: “Perfect…bahahaha.”
Stoner found her time working in rural Australia punctuated by intimidation and degrading incidents at the hands of male farmers. At one isolated farm a middle-aged farmer suggested she and her friend Elle Kerridge should pick fruit naked. At another, more disturbing forms of harassment occurred.
Foreign backpackers are particularly vulnerable to exploitation because they must spend 88 days in a rural area in order to secure a second year on their working holiday visas. A whole industry of hostels offering job services has sprung up as a result of the policy. But it has also meant that workers, particularly female workers, are prepared to endure harassing and even illegal behaviour to secure their second year here.
Now studying film-making at University of Lincoln, Stoner has decided to return to Australia to make a documentary on the topic. She’s raising money on an incubator site and working on pre-production of 88 Days, the working title of her project. She hopes to be back in Australia in time to film in the fruit-picking season.
A major study released last month by three Sydney universities, based on responses to an online survey by 4,322 foreign temporary workers, found workplace exploitation was “endemic and severe”.
The fight against gender disparity, which has underpinned the status quo for decades, has shifted from the margins to the mainstream in five short years – and now it’s driving policy.
Several powerful industry figures have helped lead this change. Producer Sue Maslin, financing the Dressmaker in 2012, refused to give up when told the film’s audience was “limited because it was heavily skewed to females.” It became the highest grossing Australian film of 2015/16, earning $20.28 million at the box office and proving “once and for all there was a business case to be made for a film by and about women, targeted to a female audience,” Maslin told Guardian Australia.
Actor Cate Blanchett, accepting the 2014 Oscar for Blue Jasmine, reminded Hollywood that films with female protagonists “make money”. Her comment briefly ruffled the Twitter-verse, before the Geena Davis Institute backed it with proof: of the 100 top-grossing non-animation movies of 2015, those with female leads made 15.8% more money than those with male leads – despite comprising only 17% of the list.
In her first day on the job in 2015, Screen NSW CEO Courtney Gibson introduced the “50:50 by 2020” target across the agency’s development and production arms. According to Create NSW, the policy has since put 150 female filmmakers in contact with previously unreachable distributors, and seen female TV drama directors rise from 18% to 47% in two years.
The congressman’s statement said he deeply regretted that his discussion of surrogacy in the workplace “caused distress”, but he left unclear the circumstances of the discussion. A source familiar with the allegations said that Franks asked two female staffers who worked for him at the time to be surrogate mothers for his child. Franks’s office refused to comment on that issue.
He also shared details about the difficulties he and his wife had had conceiving a child, including three miscarriages and two failed attempts to adopt a child before a “wonderful and loving lady” acted as a gestational surrogate for their twins. He said the process was a “pro-life approach that did not discard or throw away any embryos”.
The issue of retaining talent in law, especially women lawyers, relies on workplaces that are committed to dealing with discrimination.
That is the message of Law Society of NSW president Pauline Wright, who last week urged employers to ensure that their organisations do not “tacitly permit or tolerate a culture of sexism, harassment or bullying”.
A panel of eminent women leaders in law discussed similar challenges that the legal profession had to overcome before it could claim there was true equal opportunity for both men and women.
A growing list of powerful men have faced serious consequences for sexual misconduct allegations but the most powerful one of all has faced none. Instead Donald Trump’s official position, as his spokeswoman Sarah Sanders recently clarified in a White House press briefing, is that the 20 women accusing him of assault and harassment are lying. Trump has also suggested some were not attractive enough for him to want to sexually assault. As the conversation around sexual conduct continues to evolve, and new abusers are revealed, here are the cases against the president.
