More Than A Magazine, A Movement
News coverage of women by the nation’s most prominent news outlets is consistently skin deep and fleeting. The establishment press should stop treating women merely as spectacle, novelty or eye-candy and begin taking women and gender issues seriously.
Despite much anticipation, the Taliban regime announced today that girls’ schools from grades 7-12 will remain closed. Devastated teachers and students did not know about the announcement until they arrived at their schools had to return home.
In speaking with the BBC, one in Kabul student said, “I feel really hopeless for my future. I don’t see a bright future for myself. All we want is to go to school.”
History shows us that women, children and LGBT+ people face a particularly high threat of violence during armed conflicts, and it’s critical to get emergency humanitarian aid as well as long-term rebuilding efforts into communities.
For philanthropists with $5 million to give or individual donors chipping in $5, we know gender justice funders will move that money *faster* to the organizations on the ground who specialize in helping the people who are most impacted.
The trending of #Ukraine on porn sites is only a recent development of an age-old misogyny, as old as warfare itself.
Research shows that habitual users of online porn seek ever more explicit and graphic images in order to sustain the same level of arousal. This partly explains the uptick in searches for pornographic videos of Ukrainian women after the invasion. It also accounts for the horrifying genres known as “refugee porn” and “war porn.” These videos link sex with desperation and violence. But not just any violence will do. The user is mainly interested in videos that feature the utter degradation of women and girls.
Earlier this month, Korea’s presidential election brought the conservative candidate Yoon Suk-yeol and his decidedly anti-feminist party into power. But the groundswell of activism and resistance won’t go away. In fact, some think it will only grow stronger.
I was 16, on a trip to visit my family in Iran, when I was stopped and arrested by two morality guards. They plucked me off the street, loaded me into their car, and took me to the local station. My crime? I had my hair uncovered, showing it to their male gaze.
I still remember the searing mix of emotions that is familiar to millions of Iranian women who are arrested every year for this “offense.” But now, through social media, mobile apps, weblogs and websites, a growing movement of Iranian women are actively participating in public discourse and exercising their civil rights on the internet, which the patriarchal and misogynistic government has not yet figured out how to completely censor and control.
From calling out pay disparity to defiantly saying ‘gay,’ enjoy these feminist wins from the 94th Academy Awards. (After all, we can’t let two grown men steal *all* of the headlines.)
Latin American feminists are connecting abortion rights, femicide and care work into a large political and economic framework that helps activists fight for gender justice in many different countries.
For the past few weeks, the world has watched in horror as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has catapulted the nation into a humanitarian disaster. For women and girls, gender-based violence and sexual assault are extreme threats, but are too often ignored in humanitarian crisis responses.
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was a “model of composure” in the face of “egregious behavior” from some Republican senators; the “exhaustion of being the first Black women”; the impact of switching from gender ‘discrimination’ to gender ‘privilege’; women’s representation in post-Soviet states; how the Oscar winner for Best Picture will be decided using ranked-choice voting; rest in power Madeleine Albright, who knew how to “move beyond her talking points and to engage her counterparts in frank oval-table bargaining”; and more.