Trigger Warning: The following article discusses rape and sexual slavery.

On March 4, 2014, Gawker’s tech-focused subsidiary Valleywag published “Startup Flying Dateable Women to San Francisco Like It’s Imperial Japan,” stating, “A startup called The Dating Ring has taken its inspiration from an unlikely source: the ‘comfort women’ of World War II.”

Comfort Women were a group of up to 200,000 women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army. Though comprised of women from Korea, China, Philippines, Taiwan, Burma, Indonesia, Netherlands, and Australia, this article focuses particularly on the Korean Comfort Women and their protest. The remaining Comfort Women are now in their 80s and 90s and are still awaiting a formal apology from the government of Japan, which has downplayed the horror of this episode in their military history. The backlash to Valleywag’s article was immediate, with a predominantly Asian-American group of “Hashtag Activists” flooding the author, Nitasha Tiku, as well as editors Sam Biddle and Max Read, with tweets demanding a retraction and apology.

Nitasha was the first to respond, tweeting, “Twitter seems like an unproductive forum for this kind of debate. Feel free to email,” neatly re-routing the conversation into the private forum in an attempt to shield herself and her employers from public scrutiny. One Bay Area resident, Kiriko Kikuchi, noting the hypocrisy of a company self-promoting in a public space yet deflecting criticism from that same space, accepted Nitasha’s invitation and sent her the following email:

The 1994 genocide, one of the worst mass slaughters in recorded history, was triggered by the assassination of Rwanda's Hutu president, after a lengthy civil war between the Hutu-led government and the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front. It was a deliberate effort to eliminate the country's Tutsi "problem"; books about Hitler and the Holocaust, and lists of potential victims, were later discovered in the offices of top government officials. In all, at least 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus died.

But it isn't just numbers that set the genocide apart from other horrors of the late 20th century. The ferocity and concentration of the killing were unprecedented, as was its intimate methodology. The murderers were neighbors, relatives, teachers, doctors, even nuns and priests, and they killed not with machine guns or gas chambers, but with machetes, clubs, knives, and their bare hands. So many men were killed that Rwanda was left overwhelmingly female and became a nation of traumatized widows, orphans, and mothers of murdered children. Even today, the population remains 60 percent female.

Among the most nefarious tools of the genocide was a planned mass sexual assault on Tutsi women, with Hutu officials encouraging HIV-positive soldiers to take part in gang rapes. The United Nations has estimated that at least 250,000 women were raped, most of them repeatedly and over the course of weeks or months. (Some women we met remember being raped up to five times every day for 10 weeks.) Most of those women were killed afterward, but others were purposely kept alive to give birth to a population of fatherless "un-Tutsi." According to one study by AVEGA, an association of genocide widows, 70 percent of women who survived the rapes -- and many of their children -- now have AIDS.

The genocide lasted three months, from April to June of 1994. It left Rwanda in physical ruins, completely destroying the country's political, economic, and social structures. In a culture that historically prohibited its female population from performing the most rudimentary chores -- from climbing on roofs to milking cows -- women were now forced to take on tasks that had previously been out of reach. The result has been an unplanned -- if not inadvertent -- movement of female empowerment driven by national necessity. Traveling in Rwanda for three months last year, we found women heading households and businesses, serving as mayors and assuming cabinet positions. Rwanda's Parliament is now 25 percent female, by far the highest proportion of women in national leadership in the world outside Scandinavia and nearly double the share of women in the U.S. Congress. "Men think this is a revolution," says Angelique Kanyange, a student leader at Rwanda's national university. "It's not a revolution; it's a development strategy."

The look of influential women has never been so varied, so natural and so liberated. The female leaders on this gallery have changed the landscape in every arena, accountable for untold billions as well as countless dreams. Does this mark a new era for women of achievement?


When Oprah Winfrey arrived on the set of Lee Daniels’ The Butler, in which she was cast in the role of the butler’s wife, she made her presence known by proclaiming to everyone within earshot, “I’m he-eeeere.” It’s been 30 years since Winfrey first appeared on Chicago television, where daily she kicked off her shoes and pulled up her chair into homes across the heartland, one of the few African-American television personalities to win a massive mainstream following of unquestioning loyalty. Trained on twin stars of equality and empathy, Winfrey built a billion-dollar media empire that’s made her a major player in the culture of the country and the turning of the world. Hers was a winning style, something akin to Sir Lancelot’s cheerful song “C’est moi”: “Impossible deeds should be his [HER!] daily fare. / But where in the world / Is there in the world / A man [WOMAN!] so extraordinaire?”

There have been many extraordinary women through the centuries, but in this new millennium the scale on which they are achieving is something quite different. Like Winfrey, Melinda Gates, Christine Lagarde, Mary Barra, Marissa Mayer, and Sheryl Sandberg are at the top of the power grid, accountable for untold billions of dollars. In her No. 1 best-seller, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Sandberg exhorts all women to stand out in the structure, to proclaim, professionally, “I’m he-eeeere.”
Certainly, the spirit of female achievement is more liberated today. Hillary Clinton, who first attained her high profile as attorney Hillary Rodham (then as the wife of a president, then as senator, then as secretary of state), has become a force more fascinating than her husband. And architect Zaha Hadid seems to have taken the glass ceiling, melted it down, and refashioned it as a Brave New World of biomorphic waves and swells, mother ships into the future. Serena Williams unleashes her will to win with an almost symphonic range of rumbling bass notes and eloquence in the strings. And then there is the philosophical brilliance harnessed to academia (Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust), government (Senator Elizabeth Warren), diplomacy (America’s U.N. ambassador, Samantha Power), and the law (Justice Sonia Sotomayor and California attorney general Kamala Harris)—as well as the kind of dark cinematic visions that women aren’t supposed to have (filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow). Meanwhile, let’s bend the knee to the quiet bravura of Jane Goodall and Alice Waters, who have been leading by example for decades, and are, my dear, still he-eeeere.

Australia’s highest court has officially admitted the existence of a third “non-specific” gender, putting an end to years of legal battle for sexual equality by the activist, Norrie.
From now on, not everyone on the koala continent will be forced to identify themselves as a man or woman when dealing with officials, and could describe themselves as gender neutral.

“The High Court… recognizes that a person may be neither male nor female, and so permits the registration of a person’s sex as ‘non-specific’,” the judicial body said in a unanimous judgment.
The ruling has brought a happy ending to the long legal battle fought by sexual equality campaigner, Norrie. For a few years, the activist fought for overturning the New South Wales state edict saying that gender is a “binary” concept connected with only men and women.

“I’m overjoyed,” said Sydney-based Norrie, who prefers to go by first name only.

“It’s been a long time from start to end but this has been a great outcome. Maybe people will understand now that there’s more options than just the binary. So while an individual might be male or female, not all their friends might be and maybe they might be more accepting of that,” Norrie said, as cited by AFP.

They called it the Year of the Woman. In 1992, four women were elected to the U.S. Senate —  fueled in part by outrage at the all-male Senate panel that had grilled Anita Hill.  Patty Murray of Washington state, famously denigrated as just a “mom in tennis shoes,” was one of them. In 2012, that record was broken thanks to Murray, who ran the Democrats’ campaign operation, kept the Senate under the party’s control against all odds, and brought the the total number of women in the chamber to 20. It wasn’t the only time she represented for other women: In 2011, when budget negotiations threatened to shut the government down and House Republicans demanded that Planned Parenthood be defunded, Murray recalled to The Washington Post, “I walked in, and I was literally the only woman … They said: ‘We’re all done except the House wants one last concession. They want us to give on that and we’re done.’ And I said: ‘Not on my watch. Absolutely not on my watch.’”

That same year, conservative activist Grover Norquist sneered of Murray, “The lady from Washington doesn’t do budgets.” She proved him wrong.

Last week, Murray was in the Supreme Court to hear the arguments in the Hobby Lobby case, in which for-profit corporations are seeking to opt-out of covering birth control on their employee health plans. She talked to msnbc about Clarence Thomas, watching the women on the Court, and the continuing attacks on reproductive rights.
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/senator-patty-murray-talks-women-and-politics?cid=sm_twitter

Between the perennially half-naked Miley Cyrus and celebrities whose only claim to fame is sex appeal, impressionable young women are being taught that sexualizing themselves is the key to empowerment.

“We’re all seeing the same exact thing over and over again, so it’s kind of hard to avoid not replicating that,” said 16-year-old actress Winnifred Bonjean-Alpart during a panel at the Women in the World summit on the impact our sex-saturated culture is having on young women. “Of course they’re going to try to create what they’re seeing because that is what gets attention.”
Hypersexuality in the media and pop culture is a growing concern among women of all ages, as Bonjean-Alpart articulated during Saturday’s panel, which was moderated byMorning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski.
But it was actress and writer Rashida Jones, whose feature in Glamour on “the pornification of everything” inspired the panel.
“I don’t blame anyone individually for expressing themselves. I’m just worried about the collective message,” Jones said of the sexualized images perpetuated by young female pop stars and emulated by young women and girls as young as seven. “It feels like the headline. And I know there’s more to those performers than that.”

This is such an important discussion to have, but I think we need to stop focusing only women and girls--STOP holding them responsible for the hyper-sexualization of women and girls. Blaming women and girls is actually reinforcing the problem because it avoids examining the root cause of the problem. We need to start holding GROWN MEN RESPONSIBLE for the hypersexualization of women and girls. Men must be encouraged to stand up against the hyper-sexualization of women and girls. Why are they are completely invisible in these conversations about female exploitation? Because this is how unequal power structures work. Dominance operates, by being unexamined, and those in power are usually in denial, because they aren't feeling objectified and oppressed. It is like blaming slaves for their own oppression, and not holding the enslavers, the ones in power, responsible.


Fact: Adult males are more powerful then women. They hold the majority of powerful roles in our society. Look at government leadership and CEOs in our country--women hold a tiny percentage of these positions. In record numbers, men control the media, men make the decisions about what will be shown in media, in music, they make up most of the audience that support the hyper-sexualization/exploitation of women. Women all over should demand that men act to protect their wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, their female loved ones. To learn more checkout Jackson Katz's work--an ally, he is doing great stuff on this topic.

The first time I was trolled was back in 2010. After watching Andrew Breitbart destroy Shirley Sherrod's career, I fired off an angry tweet and he retweeted it, inviting thousands of his followers to defend his honor.

And defend they did. I was a number of “dumb black bitches” and “stupid ni**er bitches,” with a few “dumb c**ts” thrown in for good measure. My mentions were a crime scene for hours.

Last week, I decided to tweet Raffi Williams, he of the manufactured Ebony Magazine scandal. I fully admit to camping out in his mentions like Tisha Campbell did Eddie Murphy in "Boomerang." But this time, the trolling I received was markedly different. Save for a few homophobic tweets, the worst insult I received was “libtard.” But this time, they thought they were engaging a white hipster.

Being a white dude on Twitter has its advantages.

To be clear, this whole thing started as a joke. Or a bet, really. Last fall, one of my Twitter followers dared me to change my avatar and assume the personality of a DudeBro for a week. It seemed easy enough. I'd spent my formative years studying white culture, and considered myself an expert on all of The Things White People Like™, like yoga, collie shepherds, and Stephen Colbert. So I hit Google, searched for a random picture of a random white guy, and threw it up on my profile. I left my name and bio unchanged.

Sure enough, people (most of them, white dudes) engaged me differently. The number of snarky, condescending tweets dropped off considerably, and discussions on race and gender were less volatile. I had suddenly become reasonable and level-headed. My racial identity no longer clouded my ability to speak thoughtfully, and in good faith. It was like I was a new person.

The Honey Maid spot, which first ran on March 10, has generated its share of negative responses, most notably a letter-writing campaign from the not-at-all-overreacting One Million Moms.
"Nabisco should be ashamed of themselves for their latest Honey Maid and Teddy Graham cracker commercial where they attempt to normalize sin," wrote the group. "This commercial not only promotes homosexuality, but then calls the scene in the advertisement wholesome."
Of course that statement is one the dumbest collections of words every put together in a sentence. But Honey Maid didn't bother to offer a meaningless, pandering apology or back off the issue quietly. Instead, they hired two artists to take the bigotry and turn it on its head. They made physical print outs of their comments and created the following video:





Honey Maid released a glorious response to homophobic idiots who didn't like the snack company's ads depicting gay couples with their children.

I love this so much, and so will you. This is the absolute best way to respond to trolls who have nothing better to do but write dumb comments to companies that make honey graham crackers.

An unnamed Michigan woman who took part in one of the state's first same-sex marriages was beaten unconscious on Monday, after her attackers allegedly recognized her from a televised report on her wedding. The unnamed woman and her new wife were one of 300 couples able to marry in late March after a court order briefly lifted the state ban on same-sex marriage. On Monday, a group of men approached her on the street, made reference to her TV appearance while using a homophobic slur, and then punched her to the ground, according to the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office.

In a news release quoted by the Detroit Free Press, the sheriff's office gave the following account of the attack:

“One of the males stated, ‘Hey b----. Are you that (anti-gay slur) from the news?’ One of the males then punched her in the face, which knocked her to the ground and unconscious."

The Free Press adds that one of the men kicked her in the gut after she regained consciousness, and then fled. The woman described one of her attackers as "white, 5-feet-10 inches to 5-feet-11 inches tall, heavy set and with a low or husky voice." There were at least two other men involved, however authorities haven't provided a physical description of them.

Washtenaw was one of four Michigan counties issuing marriage licenses on March 22, the Saturday after a federal judge struck down the state's same-sex marriage ban. Although the state later appealed to 6th Circuit Court of Appeals for a stay on the decision, 300 couples were able to marry during that brief window. Although the state government has said that it will not recognize those marriages, the federal government will.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas seems determined to leave behind a legacy of turning Texas into as much of a hellscape as he can before leaving office. His latest move is to send a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, signaling Texas' unwillingness to comply with federal regulations issued by the Department of Justice to reduce rape in prison. The regulations were created under the authority of the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act, but due to information gaps and political struggles, it's taken an entire decade to actually create and enforce the regulations.

Despite the fact that it took 10 years to get here, Perry uses his letter to characterize the regulations as a bunch of ignorant nonsense the DOJ pulled out of thin air, writing, "The rules appear to have been created in a vacuum with little regard for input from those who daily operate state prisons and local jails." As ThinkProgress reports, Perry's characterization is simply untrue, as the head of Texas corrections, Brad Livingston, praised the process of drafting regulations back in 2010 with a letter to the DOJ stating, "t is apparent the Department of Justice gave careful consideration to the comments submitted by many interested parties during 2010, the [Texas Department of Criminal Justice] has few issues relating to the proposed national standards."


So what's Perry's problem? Most of his objections are to the extra protections for inmates under 18 that PREA requires. Since 1 in 8 minors in detention are subject to sexual abuse, PREA requires that minors are separated from adults and sets standards for the ratio of prison staff to prisoners in juvenile detention centers. Perry objects to these regulations because Texas wants to keep 17-year-olds in the adult prison. He also doesn't want to have to hire more prison staff at juvenile facilities to meet the minimum standards. "One of Texas' 254 counties has said that compliance with this standard would require them to hire 30 more detention officers," he writes, as if it's self-evident that this is too much to ask. Taken from another angle, however, one could be appalled at how understaffed some juvenile facilities in Texas are.

Texas is one of the worst states in the country when it comes to prison rape, causing the Dallas Voice to deem the state the "prison rape capital of the U.S." Perry downplays this problem, saying that state attempts to fix the problem caused "an 84 percent decrease in the number of allegations of non-consensual sex acts" in juvenile facilities and a 10 percent drop in adult facilities between 2011 and 2012. The anti-prison rape organization Just Detention told ThinkProgress they are skeptical of this drop in light of the overwhelming number of letters they get from Texas inmates, including many chronicling pressure put on victims to conceal the crimes. Instead, they suggest that the drop may reflect the victims' fear "of retaliation for speaking out against sexual violence."