It wasn’t until I googled “Kim Kardashian fat pregnant” that I saw it. Truly, I’d had no idea the media abuse of the reality star was so grotesque. And before you click away from this story because you don’t care about Kim Kardashian, stop. This isn’t about her. It’s about all of us.

An obsession with the weight of famous people is not new. It’s been driving ratings, selling magazines, newspapers and diet products for decades. But this is different. Over the past few years the goal posts have moved and the new media fixation has become the weight of pregnant women and new mothers. They are the new sweet spot, their weight has become the new gossip commodity and it is disturbing, evil madness.

The disgusting new tabloid frontier is watching the weight of famous women during their pregnancies, and then taunting, mocking and even abusing them with snarky headlines and humiliating photos comparing them to whales.



What the actual fuck. In what universe did it become acceptable for the media to mock and humiliate pregnant women? Oh, this one. The one we live in. The one that finds it hilarious to speculate that Kim Kardashian’s entire pregnancy is an elaborate sham to cover the fact she’s ‘just fat’ due to “binges on pasta, cake, and ice cream.”‘. They also claim she ‘hates her body’.

Gee. I can’t imagine why that would be.

Again, this is not just about Kim Kardashian.

The disgusting manner in which she is being treated by a media (and I include some websites and social media in this, it’s not just US gossip magazines) to whom the only acceptable pregnancy weight is ‘tiny’ with bigger boobs and a cute volleyball sized ‘bump’ (tangent: God, I hate that word) is an insult to all of us. Not to mention the media’s after-baby benchmark that now seems to involve walking down a Victoria’s Secret runway in a push-up bra, g-string and giant angel wings.

“Religion must guard us against committing sins, but more often, sins are committed in the name of religion,” wrote early 20th century Indonesian women’s rights pioneer Raden Ajeng Kartini. In her correspondence with Estella Zeehandelaar, she also expressed her profound opposition to polygamy, a common practice among members of the Javanese nobility of her day, sanctioned by religion. And yet the great Kartini herself in the end had to bow to customs and religion when her father married her off as the fourth wife of the Regent of Rembang.

More ironically still, more than one hundred years after Kartini’s death, even though arranged marriages are mostly extinct, religious doctrine has continued to be used against the advancement of women’s rights in this country. The cases range from being medieval to downright ridiculous.

Hasan Ahmad, 47, a member of the legislative Council of Sampang, Madura, was recently arrested by the police for having had sex with nine underage girls. While acknowledging that his action was in breach of the law, Ahmad maintained that according to Islamic law he had not committed adultery as he had a cleric perform a marital rite — in a car — before engaging in sex with each one of the teenagers.

More recently, a law was proclaimed to outlaw audible farting by women. Mayor Sayyid Yahia explained that it was against Islam that a woman should pass wind in a manner that can be heard by others, as he believed audible farting was a male behavior. Hence, by farting audibly, a woman is guilty of impersonating a man.

Kartini was born into an aristocratic Javanese family when Java was part of the Dutch colony of the Dutch East Indies. Kartini's father, Sosroningrat, became Regency Chief of Jepara. Kartini's father, was originally the district chief of Mayong. Her mother, Ngasirah was the daughter of Madirono and a teacher of religion in Teluwakur. She was his first wife but not the most important one. At this time, polygamy was a common practice among the nobility. She also wrote the Letters of a Javanese Princess. Colonial regulations required a Regency Chief to marry a member of the nobility. Since Ngasirah was not of sufficiently high nobility,[2] her father married a second time to Woerjan (Moerjam), a direct descendant of the Raja of Madura. After this second marriage, Kartini's father was elevated to Regency Chief of Jepara, replacing his second wife's own father, Tjitrowikromo.
Kartini was the fifth child and second eldest daughter in a family of eleven, including half siblings. She was born into a family with a strong intellectual tradition. Her grandfather, Pangeran Ario Tjondronegoro IV, became a Regency Chief at the age of 25 while Kartini's older brother Sosrokartono was an accomplished linguist. Kartini's family allowed her to attend school until she was 12 years old. Here, among other subjects, she learnt to speak Dutch, an unusual accomplishment for Javanese women at the time.[3] After she turned 12 she was 'secluded' at home, a common practice among Javanese nobility, to prepare young girls for their marriage. During seclusion girls were not allowed to leave their parents' house until they were married, at which point authority over them was transferred to their husbands. Kartini's father was more lenient than some during his daughter's seclusion, giving her such privileges as embroidery lessons and occasional appearances in public for special events.
During her seclusion, Kartini continued to educate herself on her own. Because she could speak Dutch, she acquired several Dutch pen friends. One of them, a girl by the name of Rosa Abendanon, became a close friend. Books, newspapers and European magazines fed Kartini's interest in European feminist thinking, and fostered the desire to improve the conditions of indigenous Indonesian women, who at that time had a very low social status.
Kartini's reading included the Semarang newspaper De Locomotief, edited by Pieter Brooshooft, as well as leestrommel, a set of magazines circulated by bookshops to subscribers. She also read cultural and scientific magazines as well as the Dutch women's magazine De Hollandsche Lelie, to which she began to send contributions which were published. Before she was 20 she hard read Max Havelaar and Love Letters by Multatuli. She also read De Stille Kracht (The Hidden Force) by Louis Couperus, the works of Frederik van Eeden, Augusta de Witt, the Romantic-Feminist author Goekoop de-Jong Van Eek and an anti-war novel by Berta von Suttner, Die Waffen Nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!). All were in Dutch.

Engizek, who goes by a single name, says the YPG's women fighters undergo the same rigorous training as men and fight alongside each other as well as eat together and share cooking and cleaning duties.

Standing on top of a bed and taking aim at a regime sniper from a pigeon-sized hole in a shrapnel-scarred wall, 18-year-old Mumtaz says joining the rebellion more than a year ago was a "liberating experience".

The only fighter in her family of four, she says she morphed overnight from an unknown high school girl to a warrior after she joined a YPG training camp in her hometown of Afrin, a largely Kurdish town north of Aleppo.

"Picking up the gun was a personal choice," said the sinewy bandana-clad fighter, a choice that bestowed freedom from rigid social mores that deem marriage the only culturally appropriate rite of passage for women.

As she spoke, her comrades, both men and women, took a break from duty in a nearby room in the desolate building, smoking, chatting and eating flatbread, cheese and fresh olives.

While the fighters mingle freely, the women live separately from male fighters and relationships are strictly forbidden. Engizek did not reveal what punishment awaits fighters who break that code of conduct.

Joining the struggle has exacted a heavy price -- most of the female fighters have given up all hopes of having families of their own some day.

Engizek, for one, is staunchly opposed to marriage.

"Marriage is enslavement," she said. "I don't want to be a slave, my girls don't want to be slaves."

The presence of women fighters in conservative Syrian society inspires both awe and shock.

"They are not women -- they are men," said one Free Syrian Army soldier with a bulbous beard. "A real woman is more feminine."

He said he was particularly opposed to women on the front line because their presence can "seriously distract male fighters".

Remember the author spotlight of Neil Gaiman? Now it’s the turn of another favourite author of mine: Margaret Atwood.

No doubt you have read something of Atwood’s in your lifetime – from 1970?s The Edible Woman to the 2009 novel The Year of the Flood - part of the incredible MaddAddam series. Or perhaps you’ve tried some of her poetry or short stories. Most likely you’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale – whether through school or because of its integral place in literature.

Over the years, Atwood has won so many awards and been given so many honorary degrees I can’t even begin to list them – so go here if you want to know more. Instead, I am going to swiftly move on to some of my favourite Margaret Atwood books…

The Handmaid’s Tale

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed.

This is the first time I truly discovered dystopian literature at its best. This is a dark, witty and terrifyingly astute tale of one woman’s imprisonment and desires – and her bravery and honesty. With a deft turn of words, Atwood envelops you in a story that grips you by the throat and doesn’t let go. I had never considered a dystopia – having not experienced 1984 and a few years before my attempt of anything similar (Hothouse was my next step shortly followed by The Road) – and this transfixed me… my next few writing forays explored the art fitfully and without much success. It is Atwood’s skill that creates a brilliant story in The Handmaid’s Tale – a truly impressive dystopia is not blood and guts and zombies, it’s the darkness within – something Atwood explores time and time again.

The Blind Assassin

This sat on the family bookshelf for years before I ever picked it up. The Blind Assassin is another demonstration of Atwood’s incredibly versatile wit and powers of observation. This does come with a warning label though – it’s a bit weird (and when I warn you that this is weird, in Atwood terms, it’s very weird). A heady blend of thriller, humour, science-fiction and romance (the sordid kind), it also won the Booker Prize in 2000. I wouldn’t recommend it as a starting point, but it’s definitely a must-read if you want to get to know Margaret Atwood’s novels.

In the latest issue of Evolutionary Anthropology, three scientists take a closer look at the nature of human menopause. Daniel Levitis of the University of Southern Denmark, Oskar Burger of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, and Laurie Bingaman Lackey of the International Species Information System started by comparing human biology to that of our primate relatives. Reviewing records from 66 species of primates, they found that in every case females could lived well beyond their last birth. Their post-reproductive life ranged between 25% and 95% of their breeding years.

Taken on its own, this result might suggest that human menopause isn’t anything special. But Levitis and his colleagues caution their readers to take it with a gorilla-sized grain of salt. Most of the records of longevity and births come from zoos, not surprisingly, where primates are well-fed, enjoy the attention of vets, and don’t face a daily threat from predators. Data on wild primates are a lot more sparse, understandably, but the picture that emerges from them is pretty brutal: only a tiny fraction of female primates survive to post-reproductive years.

Humans are different. A substantial portion of the women in any population are post-menopausal. This pattern is not limited to affluent societies. Take the Hadza, a group of people in Tanzania who survive by gathering fruit and killing game. A typical Hadza woman can expect to spend almost half her adult life in a post-fertile state. The slaves of Trinidad experienced some of the most brutal conditions ever recorded–so brutal, in fact, that their population was continually shrinking due to early deaths. And yet even among Trinidad’s slaves, a third of a woman’s adult life, on average, came after her last child.

It seems, then, that there really is something remarkable about the lives of human females compared to other primates. But is menopause what makes them remarkable, or is it just the side effect of something else that evolved in our ancestors? Humans have big brains, for example, and the bigger a primate’s brains, the longer its lifespan tends to be. This link may be due to the fact that big-brained babies demand a huge amount of energy and effort, both during pregnancy and afterwards. Those demands impose a slower pace of life on big-brained primates. So this pattern naturally raises the possibility that big brains in humans led to menopause.

There is something powerful
But yet striking about a woman
Who knows
Her worth
Knows the direction she
Is heading
And not letting others
Conform her to the
False image she is often
Dictated and obligated to be
Yet she break barriers
Stereotypes that hold her
Down which made her feel
Less than what God created
Her to be
It was paramount for her
To let go of unbelievers
who had no belief in her
Beliefs to believe in
Herself
It was a 911 emergency when
she had to emerge from the coffin
People put her in burying her
Six feet under with her dreams
Stating she would never rise
Again
Because they though the foul feces
dripping out of their mouth would
Turn her off and make her believe
Their lies but this woman
knew her power and now she is tranformed
by her inner light that shines so bright
Eliminating the haterism
Because now she lives life by her own terms
Not letting anyone control her calculations anymore.
This is the manifestation of a powerful woman
In the making

Stylicia Bowden

http://www.styliciabowden.com/

"In America alone, without the Nazi Holocaust, without the Ku Klux Klan, Planned Parenthood and other abortionists have reduced our black population by more than 25 percent since 1973," he said. "This is called discriminatory targeting."

Several black lawmakers became insulted during the debate, and at least five women walked out. Rep. Barbara Watson (D-Miami), one of the members who left, told HuffPost in a phone interview that she felt as if Van Zant was manipulating information to reflect his personal beliefs about abortion.

"I don't appreciate anyone trying to explain what any other ethnic group's lifestyle is and what they do, when you really don't have any authority to interpret it," she said. "I think the women and people of color in that chamber deserve an apology from him, but I don't know that it would actually change his point of view."

Rep. Darryl Rouson (D-St. Petersburg) said he felt the bills' sponsors were disingenuous in their mission to save the black population from abortion. "If these representatives truly care about even the subject matter of black genocide, I've got a few bills they could file," he said. "That's what got me upset. They could have talked about the bill and its intent without trying to use black genocide and black babies to sway a vote."

A North Dakota District Court judge has permanently blocked a state ban on the use of medications for first trimester abortions. According to the RH Reality Check blog, Judge Wickham Corwin announced Thursday that he will be issuing a ruling to block a two-year-old ban on medication abortions on grounds that the ban in unconstitutional.

In 2011, the North Dakota state legislature passed House Bill 1297, which made it illegal for doctors to prescribe medications with the intent of ending a pregnancy, a common practice in so-called medication abortions, a non-surgical alternative for women wishing to end a pregnancy in the first trimester.

The Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) challenged the law in July of 2011, on behalf of the state’s sole women’s clinic that offers abortion services, the Red River Women’s Clinic. CRR argued that the law denied women access to a safe and effective medical treatment that is widely accepted in the medical community.

The challenge put a hold on enforcement of the law pending the outcome of the current trial, which ended Thursday.

After three days spent hearing the case and deliberating, Corwin ruled that concerns raised in the law about the safety of abortifacient drugs are “exaggerated and contrived” and that the strictures placed on women and doctors by the law “stand in the way of women’s health.”

I first met Dr. Musimbi Kanyoro last September during that inspiring week each year when the UN General Assembly meets and global health leaders and advocates from governments, civil society and the private sector convene throughout New York City. When Musimbi and I were introduced, I was impressed by her wisdom and passion for her work as President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women. The organization's mission is to "advance the rights of women and girls worldwide by increasing the resources for and investing in women-led organizations and women's collective leadership for change."

Last week, Musimbi graciously agreed to an interview as part of the Global Mom Relay to help empower girls and women around the world.



Musimbi, is there a universal piece of advice you would give to a young mother today, regardless of where she lives in the world?

Yes, I would tell the young mother that children grow very quickly and I would encourage her take time to be with them. Time with children enhances joy to the mother and the child.

In this two-week segment of the Global Mom Relay, the beneficiary is the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA). Would you share other examples of how technology is helping address the most pressing global health issues?

Technology has always been part of the Global Fund for Women grantmaking but what we fund today is different. We fund skills, access to hardware, social media, computer trainings and use of technology for advocacy.

GFW's early grants were to resource centers, to radio shows, or to feminist newsletters, publications, and spaces where women could go to access information that they could not get in any other way. But accessing information is not about pamphlets and newsletters anymore. Information is power and women still need access to it, and more importantly they need to be creators of it. The digital divide is real. We will support women's access to technology and creation of information in its 21st century form. One of our current grantees, Rainbow Rights, based in Manila, creates podcasts about women's health and sexuality. To their surprise, they've discovered that some of the most frequent consumers of their podcasts are Filipino migrant workers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries. These workers can only find information and support in their native Tagalog through the internet.

An organization that is a grantee of the Global Fund, called Feminist Approach to Technology (FAT) was created in New Delhi, India in 2007, to "create a movement, a change in the definition of the relationship between technology and women." FAT's programming ranges from basic, confidence and skills-building courses with young women aged 12-18. The group's multi-pronged strategy, reaching grassroots girls, corporate executives and other women's groups, seeks to address the needs of women at various stages of technological capacity and create a web of influence and support through and for technological savvy. Additionally, FAT's work offers both a gendered critique of the current structure of technology and imagines alternative structures that mobilize the emancipatory potential of technology for advocacy and action.

In my own country, Kenya, and many other parts of Africa, mobile device technology is changing the social and economic development landscape. Mobile phones are powering revolutions in banking, in education, in healthcare, in the very way families and communities relate to each other. Tablets and laptops will unleash their own disruptions as they propagate beyond the city center, following the mobile phone into everyone's lives.

On a recent sunny Sunday at the Hotel Indonesia traffic circle in Jakarta, five men in miniskirts displayed posters condemning violence against women.

One of the posters read, “Real Men Don’t Rape”, while another said, “Let’s unite to fight against rape”.

Syaldi Sahude, one of three national coordinators for The New Men’s Alliance (ALLB) said the alliance was created to raise awareness among men about the need to end violence against women.

“We also want men to be more concerned about gender equality, because discrimination leads to violence,” Syaldi said. ALLB was established in response to the increasing violence against women in Indonesia. The Commission on Violence against Women (Komnas Perempuan) recorded 4,335 rapes in Indonesia in 2011, of which 2,937 cases happened in public spaces.

Syaldi, who formerly worked for Jurnal Perempuan (Women’s Journal) often met victims of violence, like women who were raped during the May 1998 riots. She said that ALLB came into being on Oct. 8 during a meeting with activists from Women Rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as Jurnal Perempuan, Pulih Foundation, Cahaya Perempuan Women’s Crisis Center Bengkulu, Rifka Annisa of Yogyakarta, Rumah Perempuan (Women’s Home) Kupang, and Men’s Forum from Aceh. The meeting, facilitated by World Population Foundation Indonesia, decided that ALLB should base its activities in Yogyakarta because its activists were already working closely with Rifka Annisa there.

ALLB sees violence against women as just one of the negative results of a patriarchal system. The alliance believes it causes various kinds of trouble for women and for men too.

“When I was a teenager in Makassar, I bowed to peer pressure and bullied transvestites. I realized that was wrong. So when I moved to Jakarta, I decided to get a closer look at the impact of patriarchy on society by working with women’s organizations. I came to understand, for example, that men should not be afraid to cry; that this would not make them weak,” he said.