Bitsandpieces @ellap82 - Tumblr Blog

Homeless People Read Mean Tweets About Themselves To End Stereotypes

When celebrities read mean tweets about themselves, it’s funny. When homeless people do it, it’s heartbreaking.

In a powerful PSA by Canadian advocacy group Raising the Roof, people who are dealing with homelessness read actual tweets written about those living without stable shelter. See all of the emotional reactions here.

Watch the full video here.

unicef

Female genital mutilation is a human rights violation that undermines the health and well-being of 3 million girls each year. FGM will NEVER be safe - let’s stand against this dangerous and traumatic practice. #endFGM.

sandandglass

pulitzercenter

Saleh, 38, is a Palestinian Syrian from Yarmouk camp, and worked as a nurse until the day he was paralyzed.

On Dec. 13, 2012, Saleh raced in an ambulance to a home in Yarmouk that had been hit by shelling. Two children, ages 5 and 9, were injured and trapped inside. While he was trying to rescue them, another shell hit the house, and his spine was crushed under the rubble. Unable to move, he watched both children die just two meters away from him. After he was finally rescued, he spent 6 weeks in a Damascus hospital, then went to Lebanon with his wife and four daughters for physical therapy. He hoped to go to Germany for more advanced medical treatment, but was not granted the visa because he is Palestinian and does not have a Syrian passport. He traveled to Turkey in April 2014, and attempted to fly to Libya so that he could ride a boat to Italy, but he was denied entry at the Tripoli airport. After several unsuccessful attempts, Saleh, his brother, and a few friends from Yarmouk took a boat packed with 150 refugees from Turkey to Greece. They landed on Symi Island. Saleh’s brother and friends carried him for four hours across the island, looking to turn themselves in to the police. Unfortunately, he fell and broke his hip and leg during this trek.

Five days later, and a year and a half after he left Syria, Saleh arrived in Athens on August 23. He still hopes to get to Germany, but his spirits are low. His injuries, the long separation from his wife and daughters, and his uncertain future are wearing him down.

Image and caption by Holly Pickett. Greece, 2014.

Holly reports with Joanna Kakissis from Greece, Sweden, Germany and Russia for the upcoming project “A War’s Diaspora: Syrian Refugees in a Troubled Europe.”

doctorswithoutborders

Photo by Martin Zinggl/MSF

Deddeh has recovered from Ebola and celebrates her joy. Out of solidarity she has decided to stay in the Ebola treatment area to take care of Elijah, a three-month-old baby who lost his mother to Ebola and has also been infected. Deddeh is now safe from contracting the disease.

mjwatson

A Response to ‘Women Against Feminism.’

Imagine this:

The year is 2014. You are a white Western woman. You wake up in the morning in a comfortably sized house or flat. You have a full or part-time job that enables you to pay your rent or mortgage. You have been to school and maybe even college or university as well. You can read and write and count. You own a car or have a driver’s licence. You have enough money in your own bank account to feed and clothe yourself. You have access to the Internet. You can vote. You have a boyfriend or girlfriend of your choosing, who you can also marry if you want to, and raise a family with. You walk down the street wearing whatever you feel like wearing. You can go to bars and clubs and sleep with whomever you want.

Your world is full of freedom and possibility.

Then you pick up a newspaper or go online. You read about angry women ranting about sexism and inequality. You see phrases like ‘rape-culture’ and ‘slut-shaming.’ You furrow your brow and think to yourself: ‘What are they so angry about? There is no such thing as sexism anymore.’

Now imagine this:

The year is 2013. You are a 25 year-old Pakistani woman. A few months ago, you married the man you love. A man you choose for yourself. You are also pregnant with his child. You see your life stretching out before you, filled with hope and happiness. Suddenly, you and your husband are dragged away from each other. You are both beaten with bricks and batons. You can’t fight back. You can’t escape. No one comes to help you. Through your fading vision, you look up, and look into the eyes of one of your assailants: into the eyes of your father.

The year is 2013. You are a 23 year-old Indian woman. You are a physiotherapy student with a promising career ahead of you. You are sitting on a private bus travelling home alone on a warm December evening. You gaze out of the window as the buildings of New Dheli rush past you and feel content. Suddenly, a blunt force hits the back of your head and you fall to the floor of the bus. A group of strange men are standing over you. They bring the metal bar down on you again and again and again until all you can taste is the blood filling up your mouth. You pray that you will die soon. And you do, but not then. You are raped, beaten, and tortured over and over again. Death is slow and agonising.

The year is 2014. You are a 13 year-old girl from Niger. You no longer live there though. You are now living in the neighbouring country Nigeria, sitting alone in small room on a small bed in a small apartment high above the city of Kano. You are not allowed to leave. Your stomach is swollen from the unwanted life growing inside of it. You had no choice. The father is a man in his 40s. He is a businessman. He has bought you as his wife. You were a penniless, uneducated girl when he came for you. You don’t know of any life you could have had. Neither did your family: just one less mouth for them to feed. You still have the body of a child, and it’s straining under the pressure from the one inside of you. You feel like you’re about to be split in two. You don’t wonder if you will survive the birth. A part of you doesn’t want to.

These are fictionalised accounts of real events that have happened to real women living in our world today. They follow the past 250 years of women and men campaigning for women to be given equal rights to men to prevent these kinds of injustices and abuses on the grounds of gender taking place. Over the course of this time, campaigners – Feminists, both female and male – have been locked up, beaten, tortured, and even killed, in the pursuit of equality. They did this with pen and ink and print; they did this with their voices; they did this with their bodies; they did this with art and music; they did in courts of law and halls and houses of government that they fought be to allowed into.

They did this so that women would no longer been seen as property, livestock, breeding machines, sex objects, punching bags, or infantile morons. They did this not just for themselves, but also for their daughters, and their daughters, and their daughters for generations to come. They did this for women they would never meet – women who lived across countries, across vast oceans, across the entire globe, and even across time.

They did this so that women like me – a white Western woman – could attend school and university; to learn to read, write, and think critically; to gain a degree; to get a job and be paid an equal salary to a man in the same position; and to sit here with my own computer and type all of this.

Feminism is a movement for freedom, equality, choice, love, compassion, respect, solidarity, and education. We may argue, we may disagree, we may struggle to understand the choices and perspectives of others sometimes, but these core beliefs of the movement have never changed, and they never will.

That is why I am a Feminist.

If you feel that you have so far lived your life unaffected by even the mildest form of sexism – anything from feeling uncomfortable when a man catcalls you in the street, to feeling scared walking home alone at night in a secluded area – and are treated with love and respect by every man in your life, then to you I say: I’m glad for you. If you don’t think you need feminism, then that is a victory for the movement. You have fulfilled all those dreams that every suffragette being force-fed in prison and every ‘witch’ burnt at the stake dreamed you would one day.

But perhaps take a second to consider the life of the Pakistani woman who was beaten to death by her own family for marrying a man of her choosing. Or the life of the Indian woman who was raped, beaten, and murdered on a bus by a gang of men. Or the life of the little girl in Niger who was sold to a man more than twice her own age and forced to carry a baby that may kill her to deliver. Do they still need feminism?

And perhaps take a second to consider this too: Even in our liberal, Western world, why do women still only fill 24% of senior management jobs? Why are more women than men domestically abused or even killed every week at the hands of their male partner or ex-partner? Why is there still a pay gap (in the UK specifically) of 15% for women doing the same jobs and working the same hours as men?

And what about on a cultural level? Have you ever noticed how comedy panel shows usually only have one female panellist compared to 4-5 male ones? That almost every dieting product on the market is solely aimed at women? How a lot of newspapers and advertising campaigns will use a sexualised or pornographic image of a woman to sell news or products that have nothing to do with sex?

Or perhaps on a personal level: Do you choose to wear certain clothes because you want to or because you feel ‘unfeminine’ if you don’t? Do you choose to cover yourself up because you want to or because you feel ashamed or intimidated by a man looking at your body? Do you shave your legs and underarm hair because you want to or because you will look ‘ugly’ if you don’t? Did you parents dress you in pink as a baby because they liked the colour or because you were born a girl? Do you want to have children because you want to or because you are a woman?

When you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning, do you see yourself through your own eyes, or through the eyes of the men that will look at you when you walk out the door?

The fact is, like it or not, you still live a world where gender matters. Where gender controls not just the entire course of your life – but the lives of women all over the world. Every second, a child will be born female in a country where she will persecuted for this random biological occurrence for the rest of her life. So before you hold up your anti-Feminist placard proudly and smile at your own sense of empowerment, think not what Feminism can do for you, but what it can do for that one girl. She needs someone to stand up for her. That someone could be you.

[ x ]

cupidmike-deactivated20141009

Read this. Read all of this. Then read it again.

doctorswithoutborders

Photo by Yann Libessart/MSF

A Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) doctor changes the dressing on an external fixator in the MSF clinic in central Gaza. For 50 days, health staff and patients at Gaza’s Al Shifa hospital, where Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has been providing support, lived and worked in a cycle of fighting, ceasefire, and renewed fighting. However, on August 26, an open-ended ceasefire went into effect, bringing a massive sense of relief to health workers and to the population of Gaza as a whole. Though the fighting has ended, activity in the largest hospital in Gaza continues, unabated.

Go to: https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org

wearethefourthwave

"THIS PICTURE WILL NOT CHANGE THE WORLD, BUT I STILL NEED FEMINISM AND I’M GOING TO REALLY, REALLY TELL YOU WHY":

-Because I got called a whore for wearing a short plaid skirt when I was 10

-and because when Nujood Ali from Yemen was 10 she got divorced

-Because black girls’ names became my classmates’ favorite “joke” when I was 11

-and because when an 11-year-old girl in Texas was raped by 18 men the New York Times wrote of how the girl “dressed older than her age”

-Because I started counting calories when I was 14

-and because when Malala Yousafzai was 14 she was shot in the head for trying to go to school

-Because I heard a boy greet a girl with “hey slut” today at age 16 -and because when a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio was filmed being raped by two boys at a party while unconscious the CNN reporters talked about how tragic it was because the rapists had such bright futures as athletes

-Because I will have to watch my drink at all bars and parties when I am 22

-and because when CeCe McDonald was 22 she was sentenced to 41 months in prison for defending herself against a man who screamed transphobic, racist insults at her and then slashed her face with a bottle

-Because no matter what age I am the biggest threat to men will still be heart disease, and the biggest threat to women will still be men.

-Because it is not just about me, because it is not just about anger, because it is not just a JOKE, because it is not just about “hating men,” because it is not just about girls with vaginas, because it is not just about ending “slut”, because it is not just about white straight girls in Rookie magazine, because it is not just about writing on backs, because it is not just about the fact that gay men are “fags” but lesbians are “hot,” because it is not just about pictures of thin white girls being the only google image results for the search phrase “beautiful women”, because it is not just about writing signs, because it is not just about what she was wearing or how many times she said yes before she changed her answer to no, because misogyny is not just about one thing and feminism is not just about one thing and it is not just “a trend” and it will not “happen” in just one way.

-And because yes. It is about equality for EVERYONE, but first and foremost it needs to be about equality for girls, because they are not treated equally to men, in every single sense, and you are not going to take feminism away from me and call me bossy/hostile/aggressive and make this about yourself or make it into a joke, because truth be told, I’m not joking and I’m tired of explaining. If you want to call yourself a feminist, you work hard to spread feminism, you do not turn this into a contest of whose struggle is greater and constantly demand to know what you can get out of feminism personally. Feminism is not just about you, or me, it is about everyone. If you’re male and you’re tired of men being stereotyped as hyper-masculine, soulless, sexist, inherent leader-tyrant creatures, then go out and prove the patriarchy wrong and fight for girls, like someone with a soul who believes in equality would. Then, yes, feminism will be about everyone.

-Sylvie (an amazing grrrl godess) Photo taken by Caroline http://c-h-0-w.tumblr.com/

teavibes

^ this

humansofnewyork

"We don’t like pictures like this. It is not good to deduce an entire country to the image of a person reaching out for food. It is not good for people to see us like this, and it is not good for us to see ourselves like this. This gives us no dignity. We don’t want to be shown as a country of people waiting for someone to bring us food. Congo has an incredible amount of farmland. An incredible amount of resources. Yes, we have a lot of problems. But food is not what we are reaching for. We need investment. We need the means to develop ourselves."

(Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo)

jessicavalenti

Denying that women are a victimized class is simply wrong. What else would you call a segment of the population who are systematically discriminated against in school, work and politics? How would you describe a population whose bodies are objectified to the point of dehumanization? Women are harassed, attacked and sexually assaulted with alarming regularity in America and around the world, and now even more of them live in states where, if pregnant, they can be refused medical attention or arrested for refusing C-sections. People who are on the shit end of oppression are oppressed. Accurately describing this is not a matter of politics, but of truth.

Feminism makes women ‘victims’? I think you’ve mistaken us for the sexists, my latest at the Guardian (responding to #WomenAgainstFeminism)

Toppen er nådd, selv om jeg måtte ta beina fatt siste stykket! #alenepåtur #litentopptur #topofthemountain #fjelletformegselv #fellerergodtåha #skiing #offpiste #fjellfie (ved Bjørsjøkletten)

#fellerergodtåha #topofthemountain #fjelletformegselv #offpiste #fjellfie #litentopptur #skiing #alenepåtur