On gender-focus. A group of young women from buildON, working with the Philadelphia group FAAN Mail (Fostering Activism and Alternatives Now!) created this video to share examples of the street harassment they’ve experienced. They’re hoping this video will assist with an effort by HollabackPhilly to coordinate an upcoming City Council hearing to raise awareness of the issue and its…
“Hey bitch!” someone yelled. “Biiitttch!” I heard again from the car. Music blared from inside; I pretended not to notice. Don’t give them the satisfaction, I thought. Don’t do something you’ll regret. So I stood there until the cars stopped whizzing past, pretending to ignore a car of boys yelling insults. When the light changed,…
In the last 72 hours, Caroline Criado-Perez has received a constant stream of misogynisitc abuse (chiefly in the form of rape threats) on twitter because of her (successful) campaign to get a woman reinstated on Bank of England banknotes. The abuse is entirely in keeping with the reaction of some men when they encounter women…
From ihollaback: I was walking home from work at 10:30 pm when I passed a group of five guys in their late teens/early twenties. As I passed them one of them yelled “You are so beautiful, let me take you back with me and bend you over the bed, you bitch” and his friends laughed…
From bust: Today in awkward slut-shamey advice, Beijing officials are telling women to shield themselves with newspapers in order to avoid sexual harassment. The cops gave out this hot tip now because of China’s rising summer temperatures – they know that logically, people will be wearing fewer layers and shorter clothes to beat the heat.…
Précis: you think it’s a compliment, we think it’s threatening, intrusive, demeaning, humiliating, and enforcing of everything that’s wrong with patriarchal culture – that our bodies are not our own. “Here’s the thing. Men in our culture have been socialized to believe that their opinions on women’s appearance matter a lot. Not all men buy…
Whistleblowers are often incredibly badly treated – even when they have sheaves of documents to prove wrongdoing. Imagine being a whistleblower when you know that half your listeners don’t think that being patted on the leg sounds like such a big deal, anyway. There’s a line in Nick Cohen’s blog about the allegations about Lord…
From fem2pt0: “We have become so accustomed to sexual assault of any kind in everyday life that we sometimes forget to defend ourselves against it.” This comes from German blogger Maike Hank who was quoted in a Forbes article about street harassment—and the problem in Germany is looking like the same problem that exists in…
[Trigger warning for content on rape.] The women carried knives, “for self defence,” a protester told news agency Youm7. A similar march against sexual harassment held in June last year, was attacked by mobs of men. The women are protesting violent attacks on women, which occured in Tahrir Square last week. On the two year…
From amptoons: Jack at Ethics Alarms quotes Emily Moss’ A Letter To The Guy Who Harassed Me Outside The Bar (which I linked to last week). Jack comments: The amazing thing is that this kind of ritual harassment would vanish with some slight behavioral additions to our culture, many of which once were the norm……