Finland, held up as a beacon of gender equality, also has one of the EU’s highest murder rates at the hands of an intimate partner.
“The welfare state has given many rights to women, but this policy has concentrated on the labour market… not equality in private life,” she said.
Source: Femicide: The murders giving Europe a wake-up call – BBC News
For those who are not asexual but not celibate either, the new label is helping to define their love lives.
In 2017, Dan Savage, the sex and relationship guru behind the column and podcast Savage Love, was scathing about demisexuality, despite being considered a progressive beacon on understanding identity and sexuality. He wrote: “We used to call people who needed to feel a strong emotional bond before wanting to fuck someone people who, you know, needed to feel a strong emotional bond before wanting to fuck someone. But a seven-syllable, clinical-sounding term that prospective partners need to Google – demisexuality – is obviously superior to a short, explanatory sentence that doesn’t require internet access to understand.”
[ed: a fancy new label for those who don’t sexually objectify others].
Source: No lust at first sight: why thousands are now identifying as ‘demisexual’ | Society | The Guardian
New documents show that the M.I.T. Media Lab was aware of Epstein’s status as a convicted sex offender, and that Epstein directed contributions to the lab far exceeding the amounts M.I.T. has publicly admitted.
According to the records obtained by The New Yorker and accounts from current and former faculty and staff of the media lab, Epstein was credited with securing at least $7.5 million in donations for the lab, including two million dollars from Gates and $5.5 million from Black, gifts the e-mails describe as “directed” by Epstein or made at his behest.
Thousands of South African women took to the streets on Thursday to protest at the government’s failure to deal with rising violence against women in the wake of a string of brutal attacks that have shocked the country.
At least 137 sexual offences are committed per day in South Africa, mainly against women, according to official figures. This week the women’s minister, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, said more than 30 women were killed by their spouses last month.
Source: Thousands protest in South Africa over rising violence against women | World news | The Guardian
The owners of porn streaming site Pornhub are profiting from “revenge porn” and failing to remove videos once reported, BBC News has been told.
Source: Pornhub owners ‘profit from revenge porn’ – BBC News
Societal prejudice runs so deeply that even some people who are disabled themselves are wary of dating other disabled people: in two examples, both published on Disability Horizons, one disabled man – worried about getting a date himself – wrote offensively about women with mental health problems, while another – justifying his use of a woman in prostitution – referred to disabled women as the “second best” option.
It is important, then, to see that the supposed inevitability of disabled people never getting a shag is entrenched in societal prejudice. And, rather than fight this and challenge the misconceptions and the offensiveness, there are still those whose solution is to advocate for the right of disabled men (almost always) to have sex with a prostitute. So if you’re fighting for a disabled person’s “right” to sex via prostitution, consider the thought that you are reinforcing discriminatory ideas, not liberating us.
At what point does a disabled person feeling horny overtake the rights of the woman who began being prostituted as a child, which is the case with approximately 75 per cent of all women in prostitution?
Australia is seeing a divisive battle between those who oppose people being forced into sex work, and those who advocate for the right of people with disabilities to access sex workers. It is hard to see justice in a situation where one disadvantaged group needs to stay disadvantaged in order to service another disadvantaged group.
The premise that access to sex workers is a right and offers choice is a limited view spawned from a failed notion that prostitutes themselves have choice.
Legalising prostitution in the name of disability access to sex will do little more than create state sanctioned stigmatising and discrimination against prostituted persons and the disabled.
Labiaplasty is on the rise, thanks to porn culture, pop culture, and irresponsible cosmetic surgeons.
In the US, a total of 13,266 labiaplasties were performed in 2016, with 23,155 procedures undertaken in Brazil the same year. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, labiaplasties have increased in popularity by 217.3 per cent over the past five years. In the UK, doctors have reported seeing girls as young as nine expressing discomfort or dissatisfaction with the appearance of their vulvas. The prevalence of the phenomenon of genital-hating among young women has been acknowledged as a cause for concern by many in the medical profession. In a report produced for the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire show, gynaecologist Dr Naomi Crouch said there is “absolutely no scientific evidence to support the practice of labiaplasty” and that “the risk of harm is significant,” particularly for teenage girls who are still developing.
Source: Women’s genitals are under the knife, and we need to talk about it
The simplicity of the Fixed It project, where I take a red pen to headlines, hadn’t occurred to me back then, but I wrote for the King’s Tribune about Tracy and how her murder had been portrayed in the media.
The rules of sub judice contempt require that journalists cannot report someone is guilty of a crime before they are convicted, which is why the word “alleged” is so ubiquitous in crime reporting. This does not explain or excuse the way rape is so often described as sex, as if the words are interchangeable. They’re not. It happens because all the myths about violence are so deeply embedded in our culture, and further entrenched by journalism.
There was a vast difference in how Tracy Connelly and Jill Meagher were treated. Tracy was dehumanised, Jill was not, and this is not unique to Australia or even to modern reporting. For millennia, women have been divided into “good women” – wives and mothers, sweetly pretty, conservatively dressed nice girls – and “bad women” – sirens and sex workers, drug addicts, page three models and drunken, promiscuous sluts. Good women are helpless victims but bad women ask for trouble. The reality is that there is no type of woman who could conceivably deserve violence but this entrenched division of good and bad women still strongly influences how traditional media report on complex issues, and reduces women to these arbitrary categories.
Research published by the University of NSW reveals there has been an almost 20-fold increase in the number of strip searches conducted in the past 12 years.
Key points
- Thirty per cent of all strip searches result in a criminal charge
- One 21-year-old woman told the ABC she had been strip searched six times by police
- A police spokesperson said all recruits were taught how to undertake a strip search
