redupnyc:

• TODAY we learned that the NY No Condoms as Evidence bill is on the agenda of the Assembly Codes Committee.The bill has to make it through a committee in both the Senate and Assembly before it can go to the floor for a vote, and we need to make sure representatives know about and support the bill before that happens. Thursday, June 20 is the last day of the session before the legislature breaks for the summer - read on below for how New Yorkers can help us go out with a bang!

If you live in New York State, take two minutes out of your day on Wednesday, June 19th and call your Assemblymember to ask for their support on bill A2736, no condoms as evidence! Find out who your representative is here. Here’s a sample script you can use:

My name is ___ and I am a constituent in your district. I live at [address]. I am contacting you to express support for bill A2736, the No Condoms as Evidence bill, currently in the Codes Committee. This bill will prohibit the use of condoms as evidence in prostitution-related cases. The Brooklyn and Nassau County District Attorney offices have publicly announced a policy against allowing condoms as evidence to be used in prostitution cases, noting the public health and safety concern implicated when condoms are confiscated for evidence of prostitution. Anti-trafficking groups like the Urban Justice Center and Safe Horizon support this bill to protect the health of trafficking victims. We ask that you vote YES on this bill when it comes to a vote.

One senior member of a leading national magazine when asked how someone could pay the bills to affording life in New York while working a full-time internship famously told us that if we couldn’t pull an unpaid internship off, then we didn’t want to succeed badly enough. When we asked how he pulled it off, he told us about how he lived in his parents’ spare apartment upstate while working his internship.

Unpaid internships and a culture of privilege are ruining journalism

(via satanic2chainz)

Just one more example of not having the privilege of a rich family being turned around to mean ‘you didn’t try hard enough’. We systematically do this to poor people and poor communities. We pretend like all it takes to make it is your bootstraps alone, when having wealthy family members and connections is a huge part of doing well in life. We individualize the problem, expecting poor people to do just as well as people with support, and when they don’t, it’s their own fault and that’s the end of the conversation. 

(Source: alienswithankhs)

racismschool:

For the Mamas who had to be both Mother and Father, today is your day.

I was lucky to have an amazing father who did and continues to do absolutely everything he can for my brother and I. But we absolutely need to recognize and pay tribute to all the amazing mothers who were both mother AND father for their kids <3 

rockyh0rr0rbeetlejuice:

livingthehobeaulife:

meenerhabi:

velvetlovepocket:

“If You Know Someone Who Doesn’t Believe Sexism Exists, Show Them This”

Link here: [x]

Couldn’t finish watching it.

Definitely finish watching it. It gets so much better and uplifting.

You all absolutely NEED to watch this.

A good friend sent this to me and I’m so glad she did. Whenever I talk about sexism to people (usually men) who are dubious that it ‘still exists’ or ‘is really a thing’, this always comes up. I always try and explain how it feels to be in a public space and people around you who think they are ENTITLED, just by their gender, to leer at you, say sexually inappropriate things to you, touch you, or use you for masturbatory purposes. These aren’t isolated incidents. This is sexual harassment on a MASS, cross-cultural scale. Men of all ages, all races, all ethnicities, who don’t believe that what they’re doing is problematic, that a woman’s default state is ‘looking for male attention’, not understanding at all that women exist in and of themselves, not for male enjoyment or validation. There’s a complete lack of both respect and understanding of women’s agency at play here. What these acts reinforce is that the world we live in and move through is predominantly a male space, where men in massive numbers feel totally appropriate and normal using women for their own ends. Just the ability to walk somewhere and know that most likely, you will not have to feel violated or shamed by someone masturbating on you, or shouting something sexually explicit to you, or touching you - that’s a privilege that men have in our society which all women, especially women of colour and trans women, do not have. 

It is illegal for women to go topless in most cities, yet you can buy a magazine of a woman without her top on at any 7-11 store. So, you can sell breasts, but you cannot wear breasts, in America.

Violet Rose (via c-icatrix)

Talk about cognitive dissonance

(via havocados)

(Source: screamingfemale)

lalobalocaart:

PLEASE SHARE

it is hard to find abortion support and info in the internet because all those anti choice, anti autonomy, pro bs people got nothing to do but act stupid in the internet and upload pro bs propaganda. SO PLEASE SHARE WIDE

repair-her-armor:

That doesn’t make me uncomfortable at all, of course not.

Some lovely costuming from ‘Scarlet Blade’, a free online MMORPG. 

repair-her-armor:

eschergirls:

Hey it’s another video! (Thank you to everybody who submitted this to me.)  This one is by MMO Attack contributor Joe Plork and is about hyper-sexualizing in video games, and how this is actually a really immature and superficial take on “sex” because actual sex, sexuality and sexual encounters are not actually often in games, and it’s just “hey look at the boobs while she beats somebody up or kills somebody or is killed.  Look at the pornface while she’s shooting a gun or being headbutted!” and what not.  It also goes to something that was said in the comments on this blog recently, that when people say “sex sells” about this stuff, that’s actually not true, because no sex is actually being sold.  We’re selling sexualization of women, but generally, not actual sex.

As Jimquisition talked about in a previous video, developers have been told by publishers to actually not have their female characters have straight sexual relationships because it’ll turn off the straight male audience.  We want women in games to be sexualized, but not sexual.  We want female characters in porn poses, with orgasm faces, curved spines indicating lordosis behavior, skin showing, battle bikinis, angles that show butts, close ups that show boobs, etc, while she’s fighting, or getting beaten up, or captured, or falling, or etc etc etc, but not actually having sex.  And we end up with stuff that just ends up being ridiculous with the battle bikinis, Ed Benes butt shots where it looks like everything is being drawn from the perspective of a gnome, and women who look like they’re orgasming or posing when they’re supposed to be injured or dead.  And even when they’re drawing stuff that’s meant to be sexy, like a woman in a bikini, there’s still often issues like breaking her spine because you just have to get as many sexy bits into the scene as possible.  It’s like everything is drawn as if the audience or creator might never see another sexy woman again, and we better make sure that every panel there’s a chance to get boobs and butt, we do it.  And it hurts storytelling and characterization.

Plus, as my friend always says: if everything is sexualized, then nobody is actually sexual.  If all female characters are always swaying their hips, in boobs and butt poses, in revealing outfits, with the same faces, expressions, lipstick, eyeliner, etc, whether they’re fighting, eating, or injured, then it’s really hard to convey that any of the female characters are different, especially if you want to convey that some of them are sexual and others aren’t. 

It’s like a Michael Bay move: overusing CGI, explosions, rapid scene cuts, etc, doesn’t create an effective action movie, it creates a giant mess that’s hard to follow, takes away from telling a story, and can take viewers out of the movie.  Just like use of action can be gratuitous or effective, so can use of sexualization, and sex.  Having everything explode all the time and huge CGI battles may make a movie “action packed”, but not necessarily a good movie, having battle bikinis and boobs and butt fighting poses may make a comic or video game “sexualized”, but does not necessarily make it sexy, and can be just as distracting and harmful to storytelling as overusing CGI or explosions.

spot on

I’ve just discovered these two blogs today: Repair Her Armor and Escher Girls, and they are both fantastic! They’re dedicated to showing how absolutely ridiculously sexualized women’s bodies and outfits are made to look in comics and video games, and ask readers to redesign women’s outfits to show that it’s totally possible to have a woman fighting without her tits and ass hanging out. I’ll be reblogging some more content from them today!

erinkyan:

soufex:

clambistro:

getontheaeroplane:

And suddenly, in a week where things were looking pretty grim for the men of Australia, Chief of Army David Morrison arose to kick some derrière. 

I would like to see this played in public at regular intervals, perhaps with a “Men of Australia” introduction. Repeat offenders will have Lt Gen Morrison come around to your house and yell at you until you spontaneously combust.

Rapists and sexual abusers and bullies and sexists: Lt Gen Morrison is going to SMASH YOU (with words and sternness).

“If that does not suit you, then get out. You may find another employer where your attitude and behaviour is accepted, but I doubt it. […] If you become aware of any individual degrading another, then show moral courage, and take a stand against it.”

straya, cunts. we need more of this.

wow this is guy is 500000% done with bullshit and he is brimming with righteous anger and it’s fucking perfect.  what a fucking great guy!

saw this today and absolutely loved it. He is addressing the ”report by Elizabeth Broderick in the Sydney Morning Herald which outlines how male members of the Australian army are under investigation for producing and distributing ‘explicit emails and photos that demean and denigrate women.’ Worse yet, the explicit material was distributed to the internet via military networks. The number of men under investigation has reached a staggering 100, to include ‘senior officers’. (From Business Insider)

Some of his comments from the video:

“[Women] are vital to us maintaining our capability now, and in the future. If that does not suit you, then get out. You may find another employer where your behavior is acceptable, but I doubt it.”

“I will be ruthless in ridding the army of people who cannot live up to its values.”

The US top brass have a lot to learn from this guy. 

oradianto:

Boobs, brews, bros, boats, balls, Borat, baldness, and breadwinning. Now that I’ve weeded out all the ladyreaders with that completely testosterone-soaked sentence of man related B words, I’m going to share an important man fact with all the dudes out there: your brains are better than lady brains. Says who? Says Maine’s Republican House Minority Leader/brain expert Ken Fredette, during a debate on the House floor on Wednesday. Bonus: he supported his argument using a widely-derided book from 21 years ago. Too bad Fredette’s manbrain didn’t understand how video cameras or the internet work. Or, uh, public record, for that matter.

Fredette’s heroic application of gender essentialism came in the context of a discussion of — you guessed it (actually, you probably you didn’t) — application of Obamacare’s federal funding for the Medicaid expansion at the state level. I’d explain it, but it would be easier for me to just step aside before my yogurt addled chickbrain ovulates all over Ken Fredette’s turgid, rock-hard logic and let a man explain. Fredette’s floor soliloquy, per ThinkProgress,

As I listen to the debate today and earlier debate on this bill, I can’t help but think of a title of a book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. And it’s a book about the fact that men sort of think one way in their own brain, in their own world. And women think another way in their own brain and in their own world. And it really talks about the way that men and women can do a better job at communicating. Because if you listen to the debate today, in my mind — a man’s mind — I hear two fundamental issues. From the other side of the aisle, I hear the conversation being about: free. ‘This is free, we need to take it, and it’s free. And we need to do it now.’ And that’s the fundamental message that my brain receives. Now, my brain, being a man’s brain, sort of thinks differently, because I say, well, it’s not — if it’s free, is it really free? Because I say, in my brain, there’s a cost to this.

Woo! Ladies be shopping with they maxed out credit cards!

Absurdity of comparing being in favor of expanding fucking health careto being a silly girl who doesn’t understand money aside, we should all be grateful for men like Ken Fredette. If it wasn’t for dudes telling me all about the negative ways women think and behave, I’d have no idea how to be a woman at all. Let me add “loves free shit and doesn’t understand cost” to the list of shitty woman things I’m supposed to embody, right after “trying to guilt trip hapless guy into putting ring on finger,” “bAbY fEvEr!,” and “catfights, catfights, catfights.”

And in case you heard of the book Fredette referenced, — Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus — it was a smash hit in the early 1990’s and is currently encrusted with mildew in a forgotten corner of your parents’ basement.

My woman brain did not comprehend this. Mansplain, please?