November 2005 Archives

Samsung is selling a new cell phone for women. It's not only sparkly and pink-- bonus features include offensive gender stereotypes!

The phone has a built-in shopping list, fat calculator and favorite fragrance list. Plus, says Samsung marketer Jenny Goodridge, "You can put in your birth date and it will tell you if you are intelligent, attractive or emotionally stable. You can't be all three on any day... It's pretty funny." Hilarious!

The phone also has an ovulation calendar. There aren't details on how it works, but this is the one feature that might actually be useful.

Samsung is looking to sell the phone to women ages 24 and younger. And though I'm in the target market, I can't seem understand the "girly appeal." Sigh. I'm probably not having an "intelligent" day.

The Supreme Court started hearing arguments on Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood today, and already the fur is flying.

The court, starting with Justice David Souter, a New Hampshire native, wasted little time before firing questions at Ayotte about how the state's law deals with situations where a minor's health — but not life — is in danger and she needs an immediate abortion.

Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer zeroed in on how doctors would avoid being prosecuted or sued if they performed an abortion if the minor did not want to notify a parent and a judge was unavailable to provide the necessary approval.

The justices did not seem satisfied when Ayotte said another, existing New Hampshire law would protect the doctor from legal action and that the state's attorney general would set a policy that would shield physicians in such instances.

"How do we know that's the law?" asked Breyer. "There are people of good faith on both sides of this argument" who may disagree about the other law's meaning.

"In an emergency, a woman needs to go to the hospital not a courthouse," justices were told in a filing by Jennifer Dalven, attorney for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England which challenged the law.

Ahh, courthouse, hospital--what's the difference? We just should have kept our legs closed, right?

Sweet.

Two Saudi businesswomen have been elected in the kingdom's first ballot in which women were allowed to stand.

Lama al-Suleiman and Nashwa Taher were among 12 successful candidates voted onto the board of Jeddah's chamber of commerce and industry.

The turnout was low and the election was only a local affair, but analysts say it is a significant step.

I’d say so! Now about that driving thing…

Charlotte’s Fox Channel 18 accomplished quite a feat recently when they created a news teaser that combined the shame of abstinence-only education with the visuals of porn.

The 20-second promo for the 10 p.m. newscast showed a teenage couple and said:

"These local kids found God. They pledged abstinence. But now they're getting on their knees. And it definitely isn't to pray. ... They found a loophole in chastity. Don't worry about your kids' virginity. Worry about their oral fixation."

And with that, the screen showed a woman, her eyes obscured, licking a red, white and blue ice pop.

I’ll suppress my urge to make a Mr. Softee joke. Outside of the promo’s obvious ick factor, why is it that oral sex means girls sucking dick? It’s already been shown that teens who have oral sex are doing it in a fairly reciprocal fashion. I guess when it comes to teen sex scare tactics, it’s all about the ladies.

My internet is rebelling against me today, so I’ll happily point folks in the direction of these recent must-reads:

Rebecca “Smartypants” Traister points out the strange misogynist response to Dowd’s book on Amazon. I think Mr. John F. Ross really needs to meet Vox Day for some bosom buddy woman-bashing.

After a bit of a mailing list scuffle where Ampersand called Cathy Young an “anti-feminist” (and I think rightly so), he explores the meaning of the term.

Jill at Feministe wades into the scummy waters of guys who think rape is some sort of figment of women’s imagination.

Amanda breaks down the elusive nature of the Strawfeminist.

Media Girl tells it like it is (and it ain’t pretty) on the Global Gag Rule and the AIDS pandemic in Africa.

The Supreme Court will meet tomorrow to start hearing arguments on Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood, the court’s first abortion case in five years.

On a conference call last night for bloggers, speakers from NARAL Pro-Choice America, the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project and NARAL Pro-Choice New Hampshire explained that Ayotte is about a hell of a lot more than parental notification.

This case isn’t arguing whether or not parents should be notified or give consent when their daughters want to obtain an abortion--it’s about the health of young women:

New Hampshire imposes a 48-hour waiting period after the required notice to at least one parent. Like all states, it provides an exception for conditions that present an immediate threat to a pregnant teenager's life.

But of the 43 states with parental-involvement statutes, New Hampshire is one of only five that do not also provide an exception for non-life-threatening medical emergencies, and it was on this basis that two lower federal courts declared the law unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court's decision in the case, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, may therefore shed light on the contours of the "health exception" that the court's abortion precedents have required since Roe v. Wade in 1973.

No matter what someone thinks about abortion, I think any parent would want their child to get the best medical care possible. And if your daughter is in medical distress, you would want her doctor taking care of her, not running off to find a lawyer and a judge.

I found the jackpot of offensive t-shirts after seeing an ad for the company in The Onion.

What kills me is that a lot of the shirts are anti-Bush, liberal-ish types. And then there are shirts like the one above. Sigh.

More shirts after the jump.

Cause the only way to respect your body is to wait for someone to pay for it. By this logic, I wonder if it's cool to have oral in exchange for some earrings.

Via Shakespeare's Sister.

The good news: There are more women in chess than ever before.

The bad news: They’re being noticed because of the way they look, not the way they play.

The New York Times reports on women in competitive chess who are showing off more than their brain power to get noticed in the traditionally male-dominated field.

Vanessa Reid, a 16-year-old student from Sydney, Australia, runs cross-country, plays touch football, enjoys in-line skating, swims and goes bodyboarding. She also has a cerebral side: she plays competitive chess. She represented Australia at a tournament in Malaysia in 2002 and played in a tournament in New Zealand this year.

While Ms. Reid is clearly no novice at the game, she isn't exactly taking it by storm. She is not on the World Chess Federation's list of the world's 50 top female players. In fact she is ranked 47,694th among both men and women. But Ms. Reid, who has auburn hair, light-blue eyes and a winning smile, is arguably the top player in the world based on a more subjective criterion: her looks. A Web site called World Chess Beauty Contest (www.1wcbc.com) ranks her as the world's most beautiful woman in the game.

...Alexandra Kosteniuk, 21, a dark-haired, porcelain-skinned Russian grandmaster who is ranked fifth in the world among women and 525th over all, models and uses her Web site to sell photos of herself posing in bikinis next to giant chess pieces.

Maria Manakova, 31, who is the fourth-ranked woman in Russia and who is ranked eighth on the Beauty Contest site, attracted attention last year when she posed nude for Speed, a Russian magazine.

Of course it’s sad that these women are only being noticed because of their physical assets, but it’s their right to promote themselves however they want. It was something else in the article that really disturbed me.

Goodness. Apparently Teen People was planning on running an article on Prussian Blue, the scary twins that sing about “white pride” and crushing on Hitler.

Teen People nixed a story about Hitler-loving teenybopper twins Prussian Blue - amid outrage that the glossy had promised to avoid the words "hate," "supremacist" and "Nazi" in its piece on the racist singing sisters.

A Web-based teaser for the February story originally called the hatemongering duo "aspiring musicians" and compared them to wide-eyed sensations Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.

Cause I’m sure the Olsens sit around playing a video game called “Ethnic Cleansing" and calling people who aren't white "muds."

Via Broadsheet.

Recently appointed Chief Justice John Roberts will face his first major abortion case on the Supreme Court when Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood comes up before the court next week.

The case stems from a 2003 New Hampshire law requiring teenagers to tell a parent before getting an abortion. While the law has an exception for girls who would die without the procedure, New Hampshire lawmakers omitted an exception for other non-life-threatening health problems because they felt it would render the law meaningless.

The new law has never been enforced, because two federal courts have said the lack of a health exception made it unconstitutional.

...New Hampshire's version would make it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion on a minor unless the doctor has written proof that at least one parent has been notified or unless the doctor certifies the girl would die without the procedure.

But unlike the parental involvement laws in most states, the New Hampshire statute does not explicitly let a doctor proceed when, in the doctor's judgment, the girl might be about to suffer serious health consequences short of death.

Nice to know where some folks’ priorities are. Much better that a young girl suffers and risks her health than a parent not be immediately notified. This is disgusting.

Saudi women voted this weekend on a new board of directors for the Jiddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Women were also included on the list of candidates.

There are an estimated 2,800 businesses registered in women's names at the chamber, but it was unclear how many of them would be eligible to vote. By Sunday evening, only about 50 women had turned up to vote, said Fatin Boundagji, director of Khadija Bint Khuwielid Women's Empowerment unit at the Jiddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Turnout among men is expected to be stronger, but is still uncertain.

The election has been billed as a major step forward for women in Saudi Arabia, especially after women were barred from municipal polls earlier in the year. Despite a budding women's movement in the kingdom, women are still subject to a host of restrictions, most notably against voting in political elections and driving. But many women saw the vote, which included 17 women as candidates, as a victory for women in business, as well.

"This vote is extremely important not just because women are being allowed to vote and to run, but also because it's a recognition of the role of women in the economy," said Lubna al-Ghalayini, a human resources consultant in Jiddah who voted Sunday.

Too bad Saudi women have to wait another four years to vote in a nationwide election. Sigh.

We're off to stuff ourselves silly and give thanks that no one can see us unbutton our pants underneath the table.

Feministing will resume posting on Monday. Have a fantastic holiday!

Great news. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has been elected president in Liberia, making her the first female president in Africa.

The election commission confirmed the tally on Wednesday -- officially naming her Liberia's president-in-waiting and first woman to ever win an election to be an African president. Her inauguration is scheduled for January.

Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf has served as her country's finance minister and taken on top jobs at Citibank and the United Nations. She is a widowed mother-of-four who also has eight grandchildren.

Thanks to Chris for the link.

Yikes.

An anti-abortion group has renewed its effort to fly pictures of aborted fetuses over crowded Oahu beaches.

An attorney for the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform has told federal appeals court judges that Honolulu's ban on aerial advertising illegally censors the group's most effective way to advocate its message.

Robert Muise says the explicit images can't be replaced by other forms of advertisement.

The group already drives trucks around town with giant photos of first-term aborted fetuses.

All of a sudden, Hawaii doesn’t seem like such a great vacation spot. Ugh.

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association says that breastfeeding could lower women’s risk of diabetes by 15 percent each year she nurses.

The findings add to a growing list of benefits from nursing for both mother and child, including less risk of cancer and osteoporosis for women and fewer ear infections for the newborn. Researchers said the benefit may result from the 500 calories a day burned in nursing. That helps lower blood sugar levels and makes nursing mothers more sensitive to insulin, the opposite of what is seen in diabetics, past studies have shown.

“Supporting breast feeding is not just an important issue for babies. It's a woman's health issue," said lead author Alison Stuebe of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston in a telephone interview yesterday.

Just another reason to love those lactivists.

Is this what happens when creepy guys don’t have enough cash for a Real Doll “girlfriend”?

From The Telegraph:

A village council in Pakistan has decreed that five young women should be abducted, raped or killed for refusing to honour childhood "marriages".

The women, who are cousins, were married in absentia by a mullah in their Punjabi village to illiterate sons of their family's enemies in 1996, when they were aged from six to 13.

The marriages were part of a compensation agreement ordered by the village council and reached at gunpoint after the father of one of the girls shot dead a family rival.

The rival families have now called in their "debt", demanding the marriages to the village men are fulfilled.

Thankfully, the young women’s fathers are supporting them and are refusing to marry their daughters off. But the case is becoming increasingly controversial and violent--two people have been shot and 20 arrested in related incidents.

Not only have the young women been sentenced, but Jehan Khan Niazi--the father of three of the women--has been sentenced to death for refusing to produce his daughters for marriage.

Niazi said, “I have refused to give into the council's request as it is un-Islamic. I cannot hand over my girls like goats...”

Niazi’s daughters--who are are all in school, the oldest in college--say they will kill themselves if forced to marry.

After a long wait and an some odd elections, Parliament voted today to make Angela Merkel Germany's first female chancellor. Merkel will take power immediately.

We New Yorkers have a tendency to get all high and mighty over our state's supposed uber-progressiveness. And then reality slaps us with some nonsense like this:

The New York Civil Liberties Union has filed an official complaint to the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of a Queens teacher who says she was fired because she got pregnant out of wedlock.

St. Rose of Lima School terminated Michelle McCusker's contract last month, after she told school officials she was pregnant.

Despite the fact that McCusker was praised by the principal for her “high degree of professionalism,” the Brooklyn Diocese says that the teacher didn’t “follow the principles contained in the teachers' personnel handbook.” The book requires that teachers adhere to the Catholic faith by their words and actions. Translation: Unauthorized fucking will get you fired.

McCusker said at a press conference yesterday, “I also don't understand how a religion that prides itself on being forgiving and on valuing life could terminate me because I'm pregnant and choosing to have this baby.”

NARAL Pro-Choice America has launched a national petition drive to save Roe and stop Alito. Go sign it now.

NARAL is aiming for 500,000 signatures by December 9th, so after you sign the petition send it to friends. (You can also print it up.)

A little something cool--if you collect 6 petition signatures by Dec. 9, NARAL will send you a pro-choice magnet. Come on, admit it. You love magnets. Lord knows I do.

Advocates for Youth and Sex Etc. have just launched a great campaign contest in response to the increasing anti-sex ed nonsense going on.

Some people are trying to hide the truth about condoms and their effectiveness from young people. Advocates for Youth believes you deserve the straight facts. While abstinence is the only 100% effective way to avoid sexually transmitted infections (STIs), condoms are the most effective prevention tool we have for sexually active people. But, a lot of people are uncomfortable talking about condoms. Enter Advocates' contest to design a message that will get people talking about condoms. You just might win $500, too!

To get the word out that condoms do protect against HIV and many other sexually transmitted infections--and to have fun, too--we have developed an online creative tool that young people can use in the contest. Contest entrants must be between the ages of 15 and 24. But anyone--of any age--can unleash their creativity and make an innovative, imaginative, provocative, or just plain silly design.

The contest lets you design your very own safe-sex ad like the one above.

And while I’m a couple years past the contest’s age limit, I’m all about anything that lets me procrastinate and play with condoms.

From BBC News:

After quite the controversy, the FDA seems to have finally gotten their act together regarding the new head of the agency’s Office of Women’s Health. After Susan Wood resigned in protest over the FDA’s trumping of politics over science in its decision process concerning Plan B, the agency first announced the position would go to Norris Alderson--a man trained as a veterinarian.

Understandably, women weren’t too pleased. The FDA then said that they had never announced anything about Alderson, despite the fact that an email announcing his appointment was sent to several women’s groups and that he was listed on a Health and Human Services directory as the acting director of the office. Mysterious stuff. Theresa A. Toigo, a 20-year veteran of the FDA, was then made acting director.

It seems that the FDA has finally made a decision as to who will take over the position permanently--Kathleen Uhl, who was most recently the supervisory medical officer in FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

I don’t know much about Uhl, but was glad to see that she had the support of Susan Wood:

...Wood said that Uhl "would be a good choice for the job." Wood said that she has frequently worked with Uhl and that "she is a long-standing advocate for women's health in the agency."

Let’s hope she can bring some much-needed common sense and logic to an agency that seems to have anything but these days.

Amnesty International reports that one in three people in the UK believe that women who “behave flirtatiously” are responsible for being raped. This is just fucking terrifying.

A new ICM opinion poll commissioned by Amnesty International indicates that a third (34%) of people in the UK believe that a woman is partially or totally responsible for being raped if she has behaved in a flirtatious manner.

The poll, ‘Sexual Assault Research’, published today (21 November) as part of Amnesty International’s ‘Stop Violence Against Women’ campaign, shows that similar “blame culture” attitudes exist over clothing, drinking, perceived promiscuity, personal safety and whether a woman has clearly said “no” to the man.

For instance, more than a quarter (26%) of those asked said that they thought a women was partially or totally responsible for being raped if she was wearing sexy or revealing clothing, and more than one in five (22%) held the same view if a woman had had many sexual partners.

Around one in 12 people (8%) believed that a woman was totally responsible for being raped if she’d had many sexual partners.

Similarly, more than a quarter of people (30%) said that a woman was partially or totally responsible for being raped if she was drunk, and more than a third (37%) held the same view if the woman had failed to clearly say “no” to the man.

And people have the nerve to ask me why I’m a feminist.

Amnesty spokesman Neil Durkin says in The Guardian, "There's pretty much a rape crisis in this country...It's up to the government to change these attitudes, and look at to what extent they permeate the criminal justice system."

The Guardian also reports that a 2002 study found that one in 20 reports of rape led to conviction, compared to one in three in 1977.

This is very interesting and very important.

While the identity of Saint Mary's as an all-women's institution is widely celebrated and well publicized, one definition remains less clear - whether or not the College can describe itself as a feminist environment.

Forty years after the sexual revolution, feminism remains a polarizing issue on campus. Students' perceptions of feminists vary drastically - from activists lobbying for equal pay in the workplace to women burning bras on the steps of the Capitol Building.

Btw, bra-burning never happened, it is a myth. But really this is something I think we as active feminists can do. Begin to discuss our differing perceptions of feminism and actually learn the history of the movement, where are we now and where we are going. It should not be merely limited to the academic classroom or certain circles of people.

But how do we feminism palatable for young university women? Do we care to do it? Do we need to do it?

Junior Erin Kotelnicki is one Saint Mary's woman who refuses to identify herself as a feminist. For Kotelnicki, 'feminist' is synonymous with extremist.

I think we do, but I know one of my shortcomings is not being able to express myself without straight calling folks out or being intimidating and getting into fights. How do we get these folks on board? And is it possible?

ps-a man taking care of his baby is *not* anti-feminist!

Apparently there has been a little upswing in the number of women that have decided to go back to taking their husband's name upon marriage.

Interesting?

“Adopting a husband’s last name remains an entrenched tradition that is on the upswing, despite a temporary blip in the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s where many young women tended to want to hold on to their birth names,” said UF linguistics professor Diana Boxer, who led a series of studies. “I think it reflects how men’s power continues to influence American society despite the fact that women have made great advances economically and socially.”

“Taking on my husband’s last name was an outward sign of our union,” explained one woman. “It served to make me feel that I was ‘really married’ and that we were forming a brand new family.”

This is interesting, because many women have said that to me, "What is in a name?" I think naming is important, it is strategic and it does serve as a symbolic representation as to who is in "charge" of the particular union. Language and names are a very socially mediated system of symbols and what you choose to name yourself does reflect certain values of society. In this case, women are choosing to be defined in name by there husband and that is very much connected to patriarchal control. That doesn't mean that these women don't have agency, voice etc, but it does serve as a symbolic representation.

The researchers found that many women felt they should take their husband's name because it would be good for their children and would represent the union of their family. Quite frankly, it does take more than a name to create a feeling of family union. Sometimes these lies force women to be complicit in their own oppression in ways that are conscious and unconscious. This is how patriarchy thrives.

via Reuters...

Japan plans to toughen its gender equality law in an effort to encourage women to stay in the workforce as the population begins to shrink, a government official said on Friday.

Employers would also be prevented from firing a woman who was pregnant, or who had a child under a year old, unless they could prove that the employee's family situation was not the reason, the paper said.

The current equal opportunity laws are not so effective, women are still paid 1/3 of what men are paid on average.

Check out this article in the New York Times yesterday on sex education and how the typical age to learn about sex is getting younger by the year.

One of the people interviewed is Robie H. Harris, a renowned author of sex education books for children. Her most recent books, “Perfectly Normal” (shown above) and “It’s So Amazing” are directed towards 7-year olds and up, and is soon to publish her latest, “It’s Not The Stork”, which will be intended for children as young as 4. In 2008, she plans to write one for toddlers.

This new early childhood approach to sex education teaches words like “vulva” at the same time they’re learning words like “ears” and “toes.” As bizarre as this may sound, it actually makes sense. Instead of learning it in other random ways and experiences that children do, they know about their bodies and the “birds and the bees” before they can get confused or misinformed by peers and pop culture. They also urge parents to abandon offensive words such as “weenie” for boys and the obscure “down there” for girls. Awesome.

Dr. Justin Richardson, assistant professor of psychiatry and sex ed author says:

"People have been told by experts that there's a right age. . . If you're talking about how babies are made, there's no age at which it is harmful to learn that the penis goes into the vagina . . . Yes, it's true that exposing a child to sexual stimulation is harmful. But telling a kid how babies are made is very different."

I still don’t doubt that Harris will catch a lot of shit for this. Her and illustrator Michael Emberley caught enough for “Perfectly Normal”, which had information on homosexuality, contraception and masturbation. (The horror!)

Click here to check out Harris’ work.

Just as the media finished trashing Harriet Miers’ looks, reporters-cum-fashion-police have started obsessing over special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s sexiness. Feministing has already pointed out how male and female public figures are held to different standards in the media, but the Miers and Fitzgerald examples shine a bit more light on the subject.

When a male politician is ugly it’s considered normal and no fuss is made over it in the news. But boy do we swoon when one comes along who’s even remotely good lookin’. We require our women to be beautiful, though. So when a female public figure shows up at a press conference and her fashion is sub-par, we're all over it.

I understand that making Pat Fitzgerald one of the sexiest men alive sells magazines. I just want to know why we're so busy insulting Condie’s coiffure that we can’t bother mentioning that Cheney started sporting his comb-over 30 years ago?

Contributed by Madeline Halperin-Robinson

In a radio interview on Wednesday, Bernard Accoyer, the parliamentary leader of President Jacques Chirac’s party, said that polygamy is a reason behind the riots in France. Wow.

Pierre Cardo, a deputy from Chirac’s party, explained that the most rebellious of “delinquents” are “often products of polygamous families.”

In response, MRAP, an anti-racism group, accused political leaders on the right of "playing an extremely dangerous role in feeding our country with the racism that causes the damage we know. . .These accusations shame the nation and are not acceptable from the responsible representatives of the Republic."

Fuck racism, nontraditional households are the problem! Sound familiar?

Last Tuesday, Maria Esther Valerio was found dead in a lot in the southwest area of the city. She is the 29th woman to be killed in Juarez this year. On the same day, the police chief of the city was replaced by Guillermo Prieto, who served in the same position some time ago. Yeah, that should help.

Although I use sarcasm to hide how dispirited I am over the 400 plus Juarez women who have been murdered over the past decade, a wee bit of hope is coming to El Paso during the first week of December. The National Organization for Women’s (NOW) board is scheduled to meet December 2nd, 3rd and 4th for a discussion of what action they are going to take in response to the murders.

El Paso’s NOW chapter is also in the works of restarting as well; hopefully this will help lead the people of Juarez out of this shit storm of injustice. If you’re in the area (or not) and interested in getting involved, email nowborderlands@gmail.com.

Heidi Fleiss, ex-madam and convict for running a prostitution ring about a decade ago, has plans to get back into sex work, except the brothel she’s looking to open will be full of men. A rooster ranch, or so they call it.

The town of choice is Pahrump, Nevada, a tiny city about 80 miles northwest from Las Vegas. Fleiss intends to get what she calls a “stud farm” and charge a whopping $250 an hour for the gentlemen’s services. She seems anticipate to a majority of female clients:

"Women are more independent these days...They make more money and it's hard to meet people. You wouldn't believe the number of women who've told me, 'Heidi, if you do this, I'll be the first one in line'. I mean, relationships are harder than dieting - you know what I mean?"

No, not really. (I try to stay away from both.) But I can’t deny that I’m curious to see how much business she does.

Any thoughts?

In response to Virginia’s laws banning same-sex marriages, a local pastor and his church’s governing council have decided to protest in a big way -- the church is no longer offering wedding services.

The Clarendon Presbyterian Church has long been a supporter of the ordination of women, people with AIDS and the rights of the disabled. Now Pastor David Ensign is in the process of renouncing his state authority to marry (straight) couples. In the meantime, he’s offering blessings to couples by having “celebration ceremonies” and counseling couples who support his protest. “We’re not seeking trouble,” says Ensign. “This is a statement of who we are.”

While many surrounding churches are obviously up in arms and more debate is anticipated, Wilson Gunn, the general executive of the Nation Capital Presbytery, says that it’s unlikely that the church will be punished by the national office.

“It’s within their rights to decide what they’re going to do and not going to do,” he said. “We’re in the Jesus business, not the marriage business.”

I love it.

Go check out Holla Back NYC, a blog dedicated to calling out street harassers in the Big Apple. Love it.

Whether you're commuting, lunching, partying, dancing, walking, chilling, drinking, or sunning, you have the right to feel safe, confident, and sexy, without being the object of some duckweed's fantasy. So stop walkin' on and Holla Back!

The site encourages women to send in their street harassment stories and--if possible--catch the assholes in the act with a camera phone.

The creepiest harassing comment on the site so far? "Girl I can Smell You." Lovely.

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.

Men in Serbia are lining up to have electric shocks delivered to their testicles as part of a new contraceptive treatment.

Serbian fertility expert Dr Sava Bojovic, who runs one of the clinics offering the service, said the small electric shock makes men temporarily infertile by stunning their sperm into a state of immobility.

He said: “We attach electrodes to either side of the testicles and send low electricity currents flowing through them.

“This stuns the sperm, effectively putting them to sleep for up to 10 days, which means couples can have sex without fear of getting pregnant.

“The method does not kill the sperm permanently and it does not affect the patient's health.”

Unless you count the whole electrocuting-your-balls-thing. Jesus. I’m all for new forms of contraception, but stun-gunning your swimmers seems a bit extreme.

Dr. Bojovic also noted that they “are hoping to have a small battery powered version on sale in the shops in time for Xmas.” Cause nothing says stocking stuffer like a mini testicle-shocker.

I like this. Tiffany asked last week on blackfeminism.org if we too should be rioting (like they are in France) when we begin to think about how black and brown people are treated all over the world. I have been thinking the same thing as I read and write more about incarceration rates and their racial implications and as I teach in communities that continue to deteriorate because of racist/classist/sexist policies and as I talk to my best friend, another community worker who just went to a funeral for a 2 year old that was shot in the chest.

So you tell me, shouldn't we be rioting?

Interesting that Rwanda is the highest in political representation because gender inequity is alive and thriving (well like everywhere else really) and is connected still to violence against women and increased HIV/AIDS infection among girls and women.

via AllAfrica.com...

Globally, women and young girls now make up nearly two thirds of those living with HIV/Aids, and the majority of whom are people below 24. Women's vulnerability to infection can be attributed to society's inequalities which puts them at riskâ-oepoverty, abuse, and violence, lack of information, coercion by older men and men having several partners. That's why many mainstream prevention strategies are untenable; for example those based on the 'ABC' approach. Abstain, Be faithful, and use Condom.

"Where sexual violence is widespread, abstinence or insisting on condom use is not a realistic option for women and girls. There is no full access to prevention options-including microbicides and female condoms. Nor, does marriage always provide the answer, in many parts of the developing world, the majority of women will be married by the age of 20 and have higher rates of infection than their unmarried sexually active peers, often because their husbands have many sexual partners," observed Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general.

Thanks Kofi, you might want to tell Ellen Sauerbrey about that! You mean empowering women might help in the "growing AIDS epidemic?"

Annan suggests mobilizing global gender movements, which I think is happening. What we/they need is some SERIOUS financial and resource backing, not this ABC spouting nonsense.

Another thing, I was just talking to my friend about how when people talk about other countries they use the name of those countries, but when folks talk about Africa they don't refer to countries, the say Africa. That is annoying.

for women's political representation.

Ha!

Britain has tumbled out of the international top 50 for women's political representation, with its proportion of female MPs ranking well below those of Mozambique, Iraq, Mexico, and Tunisia.

The UK languishes at 51 in the Inter-Parliamentary Union's latest table, which emerges as the Hansard Society's fourth Women at the Top report, to be published on Thursday, warns that only all-women shortlists (AWS) will close the gender gap in parliament. Women make up 19.8% of the Commons, while Rwanda leads the world with 48.8%. Sweden has 45.3%, Mozambique 34.8% and Iraq 31.5%.

Contributed by Gwendolyn Beetham

So, there’s been crazy debate from all sides lately on Ariel Levy’s book Female Chauvinist Pigs. I can’t help but wonder what she’d think of a recent Guardian article by Kira Cochrane on the British paper The Sun’s “Page 3” models. In case you’re not as much of an anglophile as me (and how could you be?), you should know that- every day - Page 3 of The Sun shows topless pictures of women. Yes, every day. Just like the photo of “Nikkala, aged 23, from Middlesex” above. I kid you not.

Cochrane, taking a somewhat Levyesque perspective, writes that:

…Now young women tend to label the topless photos "empowering" and "liberating". A recent survey of 2,000 15-19-year-old girls found that 67% considered "glamour model" their ideal profession. Faced daily with the evidence that women have to be sexually attractive to be considered successful why wouldn't young women choose to make a profession of it…With the proliferation of these images, is it any surprise that young women have further embraced it?

However, Cochrane also gives props to:

…a growing number of women…starting to speak out about objectification, beginning a debate on how the mainstreaming of porn imagery affects women and indeed men, socially and personally. Groups that campaign specifically against sexism and objectification are growing at a huge rate…

I say right-on, but I must also make a full (frontal, hee hee) disclosure: in college a few friends and I posed topless in front of a bunch of the page 3 girls that were pasted up in our co-ed common room (don’t ask) and sent a copy of the photo – nipples strategically covered—out to almost the entire campus as a birthday party invite. Were we embracing our sexuality? Falling prey to the patriarchal culture of pornography? Or did we just want to throw a really kick-ass party?

Just wonderng how people felt about Jennifer Aniston being featured as one of three "Men of the Year" in GQ magazine.

I'm also trying to figure out if posing topless is a prerequisite to being one of the guys.

A new drug for sexual dysfunction--for both men and women--isn’t a little blue pill or terrifying suction cup.

PT-141, about to enter clinical trials, is taken via nasal spray. I’m hot already.

PT-141 has been tested on 900 volunteers who have since reported enhanced arousal and desire in as few as 15 minutes after taking the drug.

...PT-141 acts on the brain to jump-start desire, which in turn can cause increased genital blood flow in men and women.

Is it just me or does the vague “acts on the brain” explanation of the drug seem a little freaky?