National outrage over the failure of grand juries in Ferguson and Staten Island to indict police officers in the killings of unarmed black men has understandably focused on policing practices in African-American communities.

But racially biased policing is just one piece of a broader system that stigmatizes and targets black men for arrest and incarceration at an early age, when many are pushed out of school and into juvenile lock-ups for trivial offenses.

It’s a system that has forged the world’s largest prison system, one that author and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander has labeled the “new Jim Crow.”

And it’s a system that has resulted in a dramatic rise in the U.S. incarceration rate – the number of prisoners per-capita – that the National Academy of Sciences has concluded is unprecedented in world history.

Women in technology continued to be a big problem this week, insisting that somehow the fact that they are women was even noteworthy, AS IF. Let’s start with the genuinely horrible and end with the slightly less horrible, shall we?

From the seemingly endless morass of misogyny and stupid (plus very legitimate concerns about gaming journalism) that is “gamergate” comes the news that, for a very brief time Friday Amazon carried a self-published e-book detailing a violent rape fantasy about one Zoe Quinn, one of the game developers who has been the target of online harassment by a raving pack of assholes who somehow have convinced themselves that threatening her and other women game designers will somehow bring justice to the world.

(If you’re lost and confused about what the hell Gamergate is, Gawker did an explainer a while back. Zoe Quinn is hated because she developed a game, and then an ex-boyfriend accused her of having sex with game reviewers so they’d promote it. Never mind that the only true parts of the story are that she created a game, she had a boyfriend, and they broke up. On the internet, things don’t have to be true — besides, she complained about misogyny after the death and rape threats, so she’s the sexist.)


Read more at http://wonkette.com/569778/women-in-tech-when-will-they-shut-up-and-be-men#6XK7EOWlIX3qvKRL.99

A Missouri lawmaker who filed a bill requiring women seeking abortions to obtain notarized consent from the man who impregnated them defended the measure in an interview with 41 Action News on Thursday.
“It took two to come together and create a child, and right now the way it is the woman gets the full say and the father gets no say, and I think that that needs to change,” Brattin said. “With the women’s movement for equal rights, well it’s swung so far we have now taken away the man’s right and the say in their child’s life.” He added, “It’s a child’s life that’s taken. The woman’s life is not altered.”

Brattin’s bill includes an exception for victims of “legitimate rape” who report the crime to the police.
“Just like any rape, you have to report it, and you have to prove it,” Brattin told Mother Jones earlier this month. “So you couldn’t just go and say, ‘Oh yeah, I was raped,’ and get an abortion. It has to be a legitimate rape… I’m just saying if there was a legitimate rape, you’re going to make a police report, just as if you were robbed.”

Provisions that require women to prove the “legitimately” of sexually assault are a standard feature of state-level bans on Medicaid funding for abortion and many states force rape victims to produce a police report to obtain coverage for an abortion. Sexual assault prevention experts, however, point out that rape is a vastly underreported crime, with the majority of victims never reporting the assault to authorities. According to one study, just 37 percent of the women who qualify for eligible abortions under Medicaid’s exceptions actually end up getting their procedures funded by the program.
The bill, which is still in committee, would also establish a 72-hour waiting period for abortion procedures.

I’ve been following the increasing influence of “men’s rights” rhetoric—once relegated to the fringes—on mainstream conservatism with some interest and not a small amount of dread. The more traditional conservative argument against women’s equality has been what I’d call the “complementarian” argument, that women were put on earth by god to serve men and treat motherhood as their central life calling, and that feminism thwarts the natural order. It’s not so much about hating women as demanding we know our place, though it is worth noting that it turns to hate pretty quickly should you refuse. But “men’s rights activists” (MRAs) have a more overtly misogynist ideology to its core, painting women as a subversive force that needs to be subdued and controlled for the protection of men, which is a lot closer to how racists see black people than how sexists traditionally view women. The sense that women, particularly feminists, are out to get men pervades the MRA movement. The fights against sexual harassment and abuse are characterized not as authentic attempts to prevent violence, but as a secret war on male sexuality and fun itself. Educating people about domestic violence is seen as an attempt to steal from men through “false accusations”. Indeed, in the paranoid house of mirrors that is the MRA movement, women are forever false accusing and the government throws you in jail without trial the second a woman looks at you funny. Feminism is generally seen as an attempt to set up women, viewed as inferior people, as the power brokers in society and to oppress men, who are seen as the only meaningful contributors to society. (Thus the name of the MRA watch blog We Hunted The Mammoth.) With “pick-up artists”, women are characterized as malicious creatures who deliberately deprive worthy men of sex for the lulz. Everything women do that MRAs don’t like, be it speaking out about rape or declining to date you, is viewed as done for hateful, malicious reasons. It’s all a very adversarial view of men and women.

This does fly against the traditional religious right view of what the relationship of men and women should be, which is closer to men keeping women as beloved but decidedly inferior domestic animals. And yet…. I’m seeing a lot more MRA talking points cropping up on Fox News and in other conservative media, and of course, the full throttle rape denialist feeding frenzy of this past month on the right shows how bad this has gotten. But now we have this weird story:

A Missouri Republican is pushing a bill that would allow a man who gets a woman pregnant to stop her from having an abortion. The measure would force a woman who wants an abortion to obtain written permission from the father first—unless she was the victim of “legitimate rape.”


Rick Brattin, a state representative from outside Kansas City, filed the bill on December 3 for next year’s legislative session. The proposed measure reads, “No abortion shall be performed or induced unless and until the father of the unborn child provides written, notarized consent to the abortion.”

Ireland’s highly restrictive abortion laws have come under renewed focus after it emerged that doctors in an Irish hospital are seeking legal advice over whether they can switch off the life support machine of a brain-dead woman who is 16 weeks pregnant.

The family of the woman want the medical team there to allow her to die. The woman, who is understood to be in her mid to late twenties, suffered head trauma and a clot to the brain.

But even though there is no chance of revival, doctors at the hospital are reluctant to carry out her family’s wishes because she is 16 weeks pregnant.

Under the 8th amendment to the Irish Republic’s constitution the foetus inside her is as much an Irish citizen as the clinically dead mother.


In 1983 a coalition of conservative Catholic pressure groups sought and won a national referendum that effectively made even the embryo after conception an Irish citizen fully protected under the law.

A new superhero has arisen in India in the wake of the brutal gang rape on a Delhi bus two years ago: Priya, a mortal woman who is raped herself, but who fights back against sexual violence with the help of the goddess Parvati - and a tiger.

The rape by six men of the 23-year-old Delhi medical student who later died of her injuries sparked national protests and changes to India’s rape laws. For film-maker Ram Devineni, founder of the publisher and film production company Rattapallax, it also led to Priya’s Shakti, a new comic for teenagers which Rattapallax says is “rooted in ancient matriarchal traditions that have been displaced in modern representations of Hindu culture”, and which is intended to support “the movement against patriarchy, misogyny and indifference through love, creativity and solidarity”.

Illustrated by Dan Goldman, the comic is about to be unveiled at Mumbai Comic-Con. It tells the story of Priya, devoted to the goddess Parvati, and as a young girl, full of dreams of becoming a teacher. But she is told by her father to stop going to school, and to stay home and take care of the house. As she grows up, she is the victim of increasing sexual violence, until she is raped - and then thrown out of the family home.

Parvati is horrified to discover what women on earth go through, and inspires Priya to speak out and spread a new message to the world: to treat women with respect, educate all children, and speak out when a woman is being mistreated. Priya, riding on a tiger, returns to her village. She is, said Devineni, “a new hero for a modern India”.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/18/india-comic-superhero-tackle-rape-women-priyas-shakti-parvati

In an appearance on talk radio’s The Lars Larson Show last week, conservative talking head Ann Coulter claimed that women who report rapes, most of the time, are just “girls trying to get attention.”

According to Right Wing Watch, the Godless author said that a botched Rolling Stone story about a campus rape at the University of Virginia just shows that “there is no campus rape problem.”

Coulter dismissed the notion of date or acquaintance rape out of hand, insisting that unless a victim gets “hit on the head with a brick,” it isn’t a legitimate rape.


“People know what a rape is,” Coulter insisted, “and to have girls trying to get attention — from Lena Dunham to this poor psychotic at UVA, Lady Gaga claiming she was raped but she didn’t admit it to herself for five years. What major crime do people say, ‘I didn’t admit it to myself?’”

In a second part of the interview, the 53-year-old pundit said that liberals are vastly overplaying instances of campus rape, which, in her experience is generally perpetrated by liberal men like the “Clintons and Kennedys,” anyway.