Another week of too much happening, too fast, so I’m going to dive right in.
As always, this diary is a group effort. Thanks to SandraLLAP, ramara, Angmar, elenacarlena, noweasels, Besame, and the WOW crew for links and discussion. Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly from this week:
Violence and Harassment:
Senate bill pushes the Feds to focus on violence against Native women.
An inside look at how the Washington Post initially suppressed the story about a culture of harassment at CBS.
“Stalkerware” allows abusive partners and others to spy on the victim’s location and communications. Hacker Eva Galperin has a plan to stop it.
Convicted rapist Bill Cosby reached a confidential settlement with 7 women who sued him for defamation after he accused them of lying about being sexually assaulted by him.
Powerful video by a woman who was sexually assaulted by an officer while she was incarcerated:
Reproductive Rights:
Catholic anti-abortion “clinic” gets over $5 million in federal funding.
Alabama is proposing a law that would make carrying out an abortion at any stage of the pregnancy punishable by 10 to 99 years in jail. The extreme abortion ban, which has been branded a “death sentence for women”, would even criminalise performing abortions in cases of rape and incest.
Rwanda’s president just pardoned 367 women and girls imprisoned in abortion cases, and ordered them all released.
Sam Bee on Roe v. Wade v. Everyone:
Workplace Issues:
April 2nd is Equal Pay Day for women, and that fact obscures even worse ones. It will take until August 22nd for African-American women to catch up to white men’s income for 2018. For Native women, it’s September 23rd, and for Latinx women, November 20th.
The pay gap looks even worse when studied over time.
Class-action lawsuit alleges widespread pay discrimination against women at Disney.
After the Discovery Channel made a virtually all-male promo, some women in science decided to respond:
Media:
Gillette showed an ad that includes a fat woman smiling in a bathing suit. Heads exploded among the usual suspects.
Amazon has cancelled its 4-film deal with Woody Allen, saying his recent comments on #MeToo “sabotaged” his films’ success. (OK, but...how exactly did they miss the previous decades of creepy behavior from this guy?)
The all-female board of Women Church World, a monthly supplement in the Vatican daily paper, have resigned in protest at what they claim was a campaign to control and delegitimize them. In an open letter, founder Lucetta Scaraffia said the staff were scrutinized after writing about the sexual abuse of nuns.
“True Crime” and the fixation with using murdered women’s bodies for entertainment.
Update to previous story:
An ongoing case in Saudi Arabia has eleven women on trial for supporting women’s rights, including seeking an end to “guardianship” for all women by male relatives. Last week, Saudi Arabia released three of the defendants on bail, raising hopes that the case might be dealt with less harshly. However, this week eight more people were arrested: seven men and one woman, including two dual US-Saudi citizens. None were “frontline activists,” but all had made statements supporting women’s rights and other reforms.
Uncategorizable:
History of the post-WW I program that tried to stop the spread of venereal disease among US soldiers by arresting women and testing them and imprisoning them if they tested positive - prostitutes first, but the target group kept growing.
A new study claims that celibacy has been rising for the last 10 years, particularly among men under 30. Echidne examines some of the more sexist theories offered for this.
Good News:
Chicago’s mayoral race went into a runoff between two candidattes — either of which would have been the first African-American woman mayor there. The victor was Lori Lightfoot, an out lesbian.
Anti-corruption candidate Zuzana Caputova was just elected the first female President of Slovakia.
Action Items:
AFL-CIO petition for the Paycheck Fairness Act.
Petition for the Menstrual Equity Act, to ensure sanitary necessities are available in schools, jails, and immigrant detention centers, among other things.
Kossack Renee M suggests we celebrate Equal Pay Day with a contribution to one of the women running for President in 2020.