As Martha Kempner recently reported, Roman Polanski—admitted rapist and all-around creep—doesn’t like it when women can control their own fertility. “I think that the Pill has changed greatly the woman of our times, ‘masculinizing’ her,” he said, firmly characterizing the ability to control your own body as a male-only privilege. “I think that it chases [...]
Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair were the names of four young women killed in 1963 when a bomb exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. The church was a popular meeting place for civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and this act of terrorism [...]
With all the hoopla over basketball player Jason Collins becoming the first man in one of the top American pro sports leagues to come out as gay, and then with more hoopla over newly out pro soccer player Robbie Rogers becoming the first openly gay man to actually compete on the field (Collins won’t play [...]
It’s obvious by now that in the U.S. military we’re not only dealing with an unacceptable environment that discourages people from reporting sexual assault, we’re dealing with a full-on culture of impunity. Pentagon officials last week announced that an Army sergeant in Fort Hood, Texas, who worked as a a sexual assault prevention and response coordinator is under investigation [...]
Rarely a week goes by without a news story or blog post related to single-sex public K-12 education. Coverage often focuses on the ways in which girls and/or boys benefit from these settings and the research that allegedly supports these claims. All this numbs the mind of someone who remembers the passage of Title IX [...]
A report released this week by the Department of Defense shows the estimated number of sexual assaults in the military increased from 19,300 to 26,000 from the 2010 to the 2012 fiscal year—a 34.7 percent increase. The number of reported assaults also went up in that time period, but only by 5.7 percent. And still [...]
Imagine what we mothers could do if we brought that spirit of loud, uncompromising, creative defiance to the necessary project of dismantling the fossil fuel industry and emancipating renewable energy, which is its hostage? Imagine hundreds and hundreds of mothers peacefully blockading the infrastructure projects of the fossil fuel industry, day after day. Imagine us, [...]
Martina Navratilova made it plain: Men’s professional basketball player Jason Collins’s announcement that he is gay is a “game changer.” Collins forces a reconsideration of gender assumptions, and his announcement disrupts outdated intersecting logics of gender and race, striking a massive blow against racist stereotypes about black machismo, bodily danger and sexual power. Momentum for [...]
Last Monday, State University of New York at Buffalo adjunct professor Laura Curry was arrested for what the Huffington Post has flippantly called a “profanity-laced tirade over a pro-life display on campus.” The display, installed by the so-called Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) in front of the highly trafficked Student Union, assaults unwitting students and faculty [...]
A group of Occidental College students and sexual assault survivors announced yesterday they will be represented by attorney Gloria Allred in a case against the college (an alma mater of President Barack Obama). This development comes at the same time that the Occidental Sexual Assault Coalition–having spent years documenting an unjust and illegal process–has submitted [...]
