Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday was accused of blatant sexism after declaring that women are not equal to men and claiming feminists in Turkey reject the idea of motherhood.
The devoutly Muslim president said that biological differences meant women and men cannot serve the same functions, adding that manual work was unsuitable for the "delicate nature" of women.
His comments ignited a firestorm of controversy on Twitter and one well-known female TV news anchor even took the unusual step of condemning the remarks during a bulletin.
"Our religion (Islam) has defined a position for women (in society): motherhood," Erdogan said at a summit in Istanbul on justice for women, speaking to an audience including his own daughter Sumeyye.
"Some people can understand this, while others can't. You cannot explain this to feminists because they don't accept the concept of motherhood."
- 'You can't give them a shovel' -
He recalled: "I would kiss my mother's feet because they smelled of paradise. She would glance coyly and cry sometimes.
"Motherhood is something else," he said, claiming that it should be a women's priority because Islam exalts women as "mothers".
He went on to say that women and men cannot be treated equally "because it goes against the laws of nature."

Why do parliaments reject legislation to criminalise those who pay for sexual access to female bodies? Because of the deep misogyny carved into the male power structures of our world. No wonder the second class status of women is upheld, when the spurious idea that we exist for the use and entertainment of men is promoted at governmental level.

Like many campaigners who have personal experience of prostitution, I support the "Nordic model", which criminalises the demand for paid sexual access to people, decriminalises those who are so exploited, and offers exit routes including education and training. It can only be objected to from a standpoint that refuses to view women as fully viable humans on a par with men. The reason for this is simple: the overwhelming majority of those exploited in prostitution are female. Added to that, many are adolescent girls below the age of consent. I know from first-hand experience that very often females are prostituted before they've even reached the age of sexual consent. That was the case for me also; I was 15 years old when I was coerced into prostitution by an adult male.

From my the seven years I spent in prostitution, I also know is that most women and girls are there because of social marginalisation - with the causes ranging from educational disadvantage to outright destitution. I and the other teenage girls who prostituted themselves alongside me in the early 1990s would sometimes, but rarely, talk about how we might get out of that life. The conversations were rare because it was generally accepted that there was no way out. Had the Nordic model existed in Ireland of the 1990s, along with decriminalising us, it would have offered us help with housing, childcare, addiction and the all-important education and training so that we would have had a real and viable way out. It is both saddening and disturbing to see the level of political opposition to the only legal framework that has ever sought to address prostitution from a human rights perspective. This is simply the only law on earth that assumes, as a starting point, that prostituted persons are worth more than what the circumstances of their lives have forced them to accept.

The Nordic model is also a gender-neutral law, and rightly so. It recognises prostitution as a system of exploitation generally entered into under extreme coercion and that such exploitation should is never acceptable, regardless of a person’s biological sex. This is fair and just. Prostitution is simply incompatible with the dignity of human beings. But while we are talking about biological sex, let’s not forget which sex is responsible for the demand for prostitution in the first place. According to Detective Inspector Simon Haggstrom of the Stockholm Police Prostitution Unit, in the 15 years since the sex buyers law has been implemented in Sweden, not one woman has been found paying for sex. Not one.

So remember earlier this week when Time Magazine ran a poll of the most annoying words that should be banned next year, and the word “feminist” was on it? Yeah. They’re real sorry about that.

Here’s what the editor’s note, which was added to the original poll sometime yesterday, reads:

TIME apologizes for the execution of this poll; the word ‘feminist’ should not have been included in a list of words to ban. While we meant to invite debate about some ways the word was used this year, that nuance was lost, and we regret that its inclusion has become a distraction from the important debate over equality and justice.

–Nancy Gibbs
That “nuance,” you’ll remember, involved Time complaining that feminism has “become this thing that every celebrity had to state their position on whether this word applies to them, like some politician declaring a party,” conveniently ignoring that their reporters cover exactly that kind of “is this person a feminist?” beat all the time.

A lot of news outlets are now reporting that Time has since removed the word from their poll. Really, it actually looks like they’ve retracted the poll entirely and replaced it with a still image of the original words—which, by the way, still has feminist listed on it.

The examples are too numerous to recount, but like any good journalist, I keep a running file documenting the most deranged cases. There was the local cable viewer who hunted down my email address after a television appearance to tell me I was “the ugliest woman he had ever seen.” And the group of visitors to a “men’s rights” site who pored over photographs of me and a prominent feminist activist, then discussed how they’d “spend the night with” us. (“Put em both in a gimp mask and tied to each other 69 so the bitches can’t talk or move and go round the world, any old port in a storm, any old hole,” one decided.) And the anonymous commenter who weighed in on one of my articles: “Amanda, I’ll fucking rape you. How does that feel?”

11-cover-mediumNone of this makes me exceptional. It just makes me a woman with an Internet connection. Here’s just a sampling of the noxious online commentary directed at other women in recent years. To Alyssa Royse, a sex and relationships blogger, for saying that she hated The Dark Knight: “you are clearly retarded, i hope someone shoots then rapes you.” To Kathy Sierra, a technology writer, for blogging about software, coding, and design: “i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob.” To Lindy West, a writer at the women’s website Jezebel, for critiquing a comedian’s rape joke: “I just want to rape her with a traffic cone.” To Rebecca Watson, an atheist commentator, for blogging about sexism in the skeptic community: “If I lived in Boston I’d put a bullet in your brain.” To Catherine Mayer, a journalist at Time magazine, for no particular reason: “A BOMB HAS BEEN PLACED OUTSIDE YOUR HOME. IT WILL GO OFF AT EXACTLY 10:47 PM ON A TIMER AND TRIGGER DESTROYING EVERYTHING.”

A woman doesn’t even need to occupy a professional writing perch at a prominent platform to become a target. According to a 2005 report by the Pew Research Center, which has been tracking the online lives of Americans for more than a decade, women and men have been logging on in equal numbers since 2000, but the vilest communications are still disproportionately lobbed at women. We are more likely to report being stalked and harassed on the Internet—of the 3,787 people who reported harassing incidents from 2000 to 2012 to the volunteer organization Working to Halt Online Abuse, 72.5 percent were female. Sometimes, the abuse can get physical: A Pew survey reported that five percent of women who used the Internet said “something happened online” that led them into “physical danger.” And it starts young: Teenage girls are significantly more likely to be cyberbullied than boys. Just appearing as a woman online, it seems, can be enough to inspire abuse. In 2006, researchers from the University of Maryland set up a bunch of fake online accounts and then dispatched them into chat rooms. Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7.

Woman slams sexist shirt; Twitter douchebags tell her to kill herself. Worst offender? A contributor to A Voice for Men

Very cool: We humans have landed a space probe on a goddamned comet!

Not cool: when one European Space Agency dude gave an interview about the landing, he was wearing a shirt festooned with cheesecake images of scantily clad women.

Even less cool: when Atlantic magazine science writer Rose Eveleth pointed out that this choice of attire doesn’t exactly broadcast the message that women (other than scantily clad ones) are welcome in STEM, she received a torrent of abuse from angry Twitter dudes, including requests for her to kill herself.

The cherry atop this crap sundae? The nastiest Twitterer of the bunch, who not only went after Eveleth but her defenders as well, is a regular contributor to A Voice for Men.


The whole thing started off with a couple of tweets from Eveleth about the shirt. Here’s one of them:


No no women are toooootally welcome in our community, just ask the dude in this shirt.
http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/11/13/woman-slams-sexist-shirt-twitter-douchebags-tell-her-to-kill-herself-worst-offender-a-contributor-to-a-voice-for-men/

It’s impolite to talk about money. Perhaps that’s why, when we discuss the history of slavery in this country, we tend to talk about racism, and paternalism, and the way that awful social institutions just stick around, those pesky buggers — talk about anything, that is, except for the profits.

But there were profits, of course, and large ones. Slavery, after all, is a cost-efficient way to extract labor from human beings. It’s an exceptionally brutal flavor of capitalism. And it worked: In 1860, the U.S.’s four wealthiest states were all in the deep South. After the Civil War, though, white Americans found ways to downplay the profit motive. “Above all, the historians of a reunified nation insisted that slavery was a premodern institution that was not committed to profit seeking,” writes Edward Baptist in his new history of slavery, “The Half Has Never Been Told.” (Read the Salon excerpt from the book here.)

Baptist, a professor of history at Cornell, has spent much of his career helping to undo this narrative. In “The Half Has Never Been Told,” he lays out a sweeping economic history of slavery. Baptist traces the flow of human capital from the Atlantic seaboard to the cotton fields of the deep South. He describes how slavers used whippings to extract more work from their property. He details how slave labor and loans secured with human collateral helped drive the industrial revolution.

These observations aren’t new. Baptist’s real achievement is to ground these financial abstractions in the lives of ordinary people. In vivid passages, he describes the sights, smells and suffering of slavery. He writes about individual families torn apart by global markets. Above all, Baptist sets out to show how America’s rise to power is inextricable from the suffering of black slaves.

Naturally, this makes some people rather uncomfortable. Reviewing Baptist’s book last month, the Economist huffed that “all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.” A few days later, the magazine took the rare step of withdrawing the review, pointing out that slavery was “an evil system.” The message was clear, though: Even today, many are uncomfortable acknowledging the full brutality of an institution that helped build the modern world.

Rebubs impose the first "Uterus Tax. Most eligible voters in Michigan are responsible

Yes, you read that correctly. In Michigan, women who are raped may not have an abortion if their rapist impregnates them. UNLESS they purchased what is being called “rape insurance” ahead of time. Result: women need to plan for being raped, and pay out of pocket in case they are someday raped. Your humble correspondent feels that “rape Insurance” is the wrong term. Really, it’s a tax on people who can become pregnant.

It is a tax on fertile women, levied upon their functioning uteri. A “Uterus Tax”.This is a 100% “republican” idea, pushed only by repubs, voted for only by repubs. Repubs have successfully imposed it upon women in Michigan, and plan to spread it across the nation.

America, you just voted to give the party behind such obscene ideas even more power than they already had. You voted for it, and you are getting what you deserve. Almost all eligible voters are to blame for such travesties as these.

Perhaps you didn’t vote? By not voting against the GOPee, you helped Repubs to win.

Perhaps you voted third-party? See above.
http://bluntandcranky.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/repubs-impose-the-nations-first-uterus-tax-almost-all-eligible-michigan-voters-are-responsible/

100 serial rapists identified after rape kits from Detroit Crime Lab are finally processed

DETROIT (WXYZ) - "I was in shock. I was outraged and I just assumed kits were being tested," said actress Mariska Hargitay about the thousands of rape kits in Detroit and across the country that have been left sitting in storage without being processed, allowing rapists to remain free to attack again. And they often do.

Hargitay joined Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy to announce legislation that will soon be introduced to state lawmakers that is aimed at setting guidelines and deadlines for rape kits tests to be processed.

"Testing rape kits is vital for keeping rapists off the street," said Hargitay during Monday's press conference.

Over 11,000 sexual assault kits, some dating back to the 1980's, were found abandoned in a Detroit Police storage facility back in 2009.

Not long after the rape kits were discovered, Worthy pushed to start the processing with Michigan State Police.

http://www.wxyz.com/news/100-serial-rapists-identified-after-rape-kits-from-detroit-crime-lab-are-finally-processed

Where Rape Victims Are Forced to Pay for Their Own Forensic Exams
Why should sexual-assault victims have to pay the state to investigate the crimes against them?

It sounds almost too unbelievable to be true, doesn't it? We don't ask home-invasion victims to cover the cost of dusting for fingerprints or the families of homicide victims to subsidize blood spatter analysis. But rape victims are being billed for the cost of collecting forensic evidence in the crimes against them.

This runs contrary to federal law, which says states or municipalities must fund investigating rape allegations as they would any other crime. When the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was reauthorized in 2005, it stipulated that all states must either provide a free forensic medical exam directly or provide reimbursement for such an exam, regardless of whether a victim ultimately decides to press charges or cooperate with law enforcement. The 2013 reauthorization (which takes effect in 2015) specifies that victims can't be charged up front for the exam (also known as a "rape kit&quot and asked to seek reimbursement from insurance later.

But they say the devil is in the details, and the VAWA doesn't provide many, leaving it up to states and municipalities to work out who covers what. Thirty-four states pay for forensic exams using money from their general victim compensation funds, according to a May report from Urban Institute. (These funds are generally built from fines and penalties paid by convicted offenders, not tax dollars.) Eleven states leave it to local law enforcement or prosecution funds; some use a combination of special funds and money from state public safety or health and human services departments; and three, including Louisiana, leave it to the county or parish to cover the cost.

In Louisiana, local coroners are supposed to provide the free forensic exams. "But in many cases, such as in New Orleans, cash-strapped coroners outsource that responsibility to another entity" such as local hospitals, The Times-Picayune reported in September. And these hospitals vary greatly in how and whom they bill. Some eat the whole cost themselves, or did until recently. Some cover testing for forensic evidence but bill victims for things like pregnancy and HIV tests. Some send patients the full tab, some bill insurance companies, and some bill the state. Some require anyone seeing a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner—the only hospital staff qualified to collect forensic evidence from rape victims—to be admitted through the emergency room, which adds hundreds of dollars to the total tab.http://reason.com/archives/2014/10/09/rape-victims-charged-for-forensic-tests

In February of this year, Ann Leckie’s book Ancillary Justice won a Golden Tentacle Award from The Kitschies—an award that celebrates “the year's most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic.” Leckie was elated. The Kitschie trophy is a hand-sewn stuffed tentacle of sorts, and it sits proudly on Leckie’s mantle. “I was like, ‘Oh that’s really wonderful, how could anything be more validating,’” she says. “I love my golden stuff tentacle with the sparkly pom poms.”

Then the rest of the awards rolled in. First there was the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Then the Nebula Award. Then the Arthur C. Clarke. Scattered amongst them is a BSFA Award and a Locus Award. It was hard for Leckie to believe. “It was kind of like hallucinating,” she says. “It’s still kind of like hallucinating. I’m sitting here on my couch and I can turn my head and see them on the mantle and it’s really hard to see that they’re there.”

It appears as though women in science fiction are having a moment, and perhaps even more. This year, women were nominated for, and won, close to half of the major science-fiction awards out there. And much of that work touched upon gender in some way. In Ancillary Justice, the main character is a space ship (this sounds strange, but it’s worth reading the book to see what I mean) and the genders of the characters are continuously ambiguous. LIGHTSPEED magazine Kickstarted a series called “Women Destroy Science Fiction” that showcases work entirely written and edited by women. It asked for $5,000 and got $53,136 in return.

But to say that all of this represents progress for women in the traditionally male-dominated world of sci-fi oversimplifies the history of the genre a bit.

What? Did you think this would be good news for Republicans? Not a chance!

You see, for the last 6 years, the only thing Republicans have had to do is say “No!” to anything and everything President Obama and the Democrats put forth. That’s easy when your base hates the president so much they would happily light themselves on fire if he said “Third degree burns are bad for you.”

This rage keeps the right wing voting for Republicans as long as Republicans tell them what they want to hear: Obama is a Kenyan Muslim socialist Commie Nazi that stole the elections, government is the problem and we’re here to stop Big Gub’mint blablabla…

But now Republicans have to do something they no longer know how to do: Lead.

Shooting spitballs from the back of the class at the smart kids doesn’t require much effort. Standing at the front of the class and solving problems requires both brains and discipline and the GOP is sorely lacking in both.