This is a blog that focuses on feminism; the rights of both women and men, of all races, genders, abilities or disabilities, and otherwise. Mostly focusing on women, in regards to: sex based oppression, mental illness, racism, classism, ableism, as well as lgbt+ rights.
i feel like why the aziz ansari case is polarising and why so many men as well as women (many of whom have previously been supportive of #metoo) are adamant that it wasn’t sexual assault is because if you accept that coercion is not consent, then a lot of men have to accept that they have inflicted non consensual sex acts upon women/people. and if women admit that coercion isn’t consent than they have to accept that they had non consensual sexual acts inflicted upon them.
and whilst explicit and repeated consent is important, the focus on “no means no” has left some people acting like ten no’s and a single defeated yes means yes. also that due to societal conditioning or pressure, women or more vulnerable people may not say a clear and firm “no” but rather a quiet and placating “i’d rather not” or “if you don’t mind can we do something else”
Instead of saying “non consentual sex acts” you can say “rape” and “sexual assault”. Call it what it is. Don’t alter your language to make them feel better.
Did these people [in academia who claim that they are not exposed to disabled people] realize that when they encountered the work of Rosa Luxemburg (who limped), Antonio Gramsci (a crippled, dwarfed hunchback), John Milton (blind), Alexander Pope (dwarfed hunchback), George Gordon Brown (club foot), [Jorge] Luis Borges, James Joyce, and James Thurber (all blind), Harriet Martineau (deaf), Toulouse-Lautrec (spinal deformity), Frida Kahlo (osteomyelitis), Virginia Woolf (lupus), they were meeting people with disabilities? Do filmgoers realize when they watch the films of James Ford, Raoul Walsh, André de Toth, Nicholas Ray, Tay Garnett and William Wyler that these directors were all physically impaired? Why is it when one looks these figures in dictionaries of biography or encyclopedias that their physical disabilities are usually not mentioned – unless the disability is seen as related to creativity, as in the case of the blind bard Milton or the deaf Beethoven? There is an ableist notion at work here that anyone who creates a canonical work must be physically able. Likewise, why do we not know that Helen Keller was a socialist, a member of the Wobblies, the International Workers of the World, and an advocate of free love? We assume that our ‘official’ mascots of disability are nothing else but their disability.
Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (via irwonder)
Women speaking of mirrors and prettiness make it all too clear that even for pretty women, mirrors are the foci of anxious, not gratified, narcissism. The woman who knows beyond a doubt that she is beautiful exists aplenty in male novelists’ imaginations; I have yet to find her in women’s books or women’s memoirs or in life. Women spend a lot of time looking in mirrors, but the “compulsion to visualize the self” is a phrase Moers uses of women in her chapter on Gothic freaks and horrors; the compulsion is a constant check on one’s (possible) beauty, not an enjoyment of it.
Joanna Russ, “Aesthetics,” How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983). (via warmlove)
here’s her shop! she makes highlighters and other makeup meant to show up on all tones of skin, and her highlighters are incredible. just look!
support her! she’s got awesome other colors, too, besides the gold and the ones in that swatch. my personal favorite has gotta be the pinkish one she named “aphrodite”!
if you can afford to, give her some business! businesses like her are much better to support then people like jeffree starr who is a notoriously racist devil.
her makeup is also just generally 100% better and also better for you, as big makeup companies tend to put icky shit in makeup.
tl;dr support businesses like wvrthy! wvrthy, keep being awesome!
goodrx.com will find the cheapest pharmacies in your area for your prescriptions and offers a discount program at no cost for some pharmacies (some don’t require the prescription to be cheaper at that pharmacy, it will provide a link to the discount card if it’s needed to get the cheaper price).
Remember that you can use goodrx for your pet’s medications too! If your pet gets medications that veterinarians don’t usually carry in their pharmacy, such as fluoxetine or phenobarbital, they can be extremely expensive since you are paying 100% out of pocket. My usual pharmacy (Walgreens) was charging over $200 for 30 days of my dog’s fluoxetine and with goodrx I was able to find out that Target’s pharmacy only charges $8 for a 90 day supply!
“The mere existence of Ben Barres—a successful, brilliant, undeniably high-impact scientist who was unashamed and so graceful in demystifying what being transgender means … he saved lives, I’m sure. Thanks to him, there are countless people who looked in the mirror and said: There’s a place for me in this world.”
On June 23, 2012, Darren Rainey, a schizophrenic man serving time for cocaine possession, was thrown into a prison shower at the Dade Correctional Institution. The water was turned up top 180 degrees — hot enough to steep tea or cook Ramen noodles. As punishment, four corrections officers — John Fan Fan,...
On June 23, 2012, Darren Rainey, a schizophrenic man serving time for cocaine possession, was thrown into a prison shower at the Dade Correctional Institution. The water was turned up top 180 degrees — hot enough to steep tea or cook Ramen noodles.
As punishment, four corrections officers — John Fan Fan, Cornelius Thompson, Ronald Clarke and Edwina Williams — kept Rainey in that shower for two full hours. Rainey was heard screaming “Please take me out! I can’t take it anymore!” and kicking the shower door. Inmates said prison guards laughed at Rainey and shouted “Is it hot enough?”
Rainey died inside that shower. He was found crumpled on the floor. When his body was pulled out, nurses said there were burns on 90 percent of his body. A nurse said his body temperature was too high to register with a thermometer. And his skin fell off at the touch.
But in an unconscionable decision, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s office announced Friday that the four guards who oversaw what amounted to a medieval-era boiling will not be charged with a crime.
“The shower was itself neither dangerous nor unsafe,’’ the report says. “The evidence does not show that Rainey’s well-being was grossly disregarded by the correctional staff.’’
Rundle’s office announced the results of its investigation in a Friday afternoon news-dump, the kind that public officials typically only use to bury unflattering news or information. Rundle’s office would clearly like this case to vanish over the weekend — but the facts of the case are so inhumanely grotesque that the decision should haunt the office for eternity.
Rundle took over as Miami-Dade’s top prosecutor in the 1990s, after then-State Attorney Janet Reno left to join the Bill Clinton administration. She has remained the state attorney every since. In that time, she has never charged a Miami police officer for an on-duty shooting.
It’s important to note that all Rundle had to do to show that she cared was to charge the prison guards with a crime. It is up to a jury to assess guilt. Despite the fact that a man died in a shower, and that multiple witnesses said they saw burns on his body and heard screaming, Rundle didn’t think there was enough evidence to bring criminal charges.
Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown spoke to multiple witnesses, jail inmates, and staff members, who said the showers were routinely used to scald inmates who acted out or upset the guards. Brown led a 2015 investigative series into abuses at Miami prisons. That series led to lawsuits, firings, rule-changes, and legislative hearings. But Rundle hasn’t filed criminal charges.
The New Yorker magazine centered an entire investigation around Rainey’s death. The magazine detailed how a whistleblower who tried to speak out about the incident, Harriet Krzykowski, was bullied, harassed, and forced into therapy after trying to speak out about abuses at the jail.
That story called Rainey’s treatment torture.
Fernandez Rundle’s 72-page close-out memo leans heavily on an autopsy that has been roundly criticized by civil-rights advocates. The report claims Rainey was not found with burns when he died. Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida American Civil Liberties Association, has said in the past that the autopsy, which was leaked to the press during the investigation, showed that a federal investigation was needed.
Rundle’s office, however, noted that one Miami-Dade County cop reported that nurses said Rainey’s body had “red areas” on it, and that his skin was, indeed, “slipping off” after being removed from the shower. Rundle’s memo said, however, that this could have instead been due to “body decomposition,” rather than burns.
“In response to specific questions by Detective Sanchez regarding burns, Dr. [Emma] Lew advised that Rainey did not sustain any obvious external injuries, and, particularly, that there were no thermal injuries (burns) of any kind on his body,” the report says. It then adds that from 2012 to 2014, no cause of death was determined.
This was complicated, however, by the fact that Rainey’s family members say they were pressured to rapidly cremate his body. If further evidence of a murder existed, it has long been burnt to ashes.
One witness quoted in the Herald and New Yorker pieces, Harold Hempstead, was an inmate serving time for felony robbery charges. Hempstead kept a diary and reported that he heard Rainey’s screams.
But Rundle’s Friday memo took great pains to disqualify Hempstead’s entire diary as innaccurate and unreliable. Multiple inmates told Rundle’s office that they heard screams, but the State Attorney claimed the accounts were “inconsistent” and could not be trusted.
“Accordingly and in conclusion,” Rundle wrote, “the facts and evidence in this case do not meet the required elements for the filing of any criminal charge.”
pornhub: the government is doing a bad job of sex education. we’ll do it properly.
public: applause
pornhub: the government is doing a bad job of snow plowing. we’ll do it properly.
public: confused applause
pornhub: the government is doing a bad job of sex education and snow plowing, so we’ll do those things in order to distract the public from the fact that we’re an evil company profiting off sexual violence and exploitation of women, and normalizing violence against women in society. By pretending to be benign and helpful, we can more easily shut down any criticism against us.
public: totally buys it, as usual, including all of y’all dumb asses
The glaring issue on Toronto rapper-producer Nav’s new album is part of a bigger identity problem South Asian artists face.
This is a really good article.
Def give it a read. I think this conversation applies generally with the south asian youth diaspora and in my opinion should be interpreted through a feminist lense. This article did a great job integrating that, heres one part that I really liked:
“On it the rapper brands himself as “brown boy,” which in a Toronto context specifically refers to a person of South Asian descent. And he represents Rexdale, a working class borough that’s historically been home to a sizable Caribbean, African, and South Asian immigrant population. I know and grew up with people like Nav; in the absence of aspiration that reflected our own hybrid South Asian identities, we gravitated toward black culture and role models.”
I think this really highlights the intersection a lot of second gen south asians face with race and class and this struggle to carve our own identity especially when its easier to appropriate the one that’s most proximate on these axes.
happy st. patrick’s day, here’s a reminder that the english invaded and colonized our country, attempted genocide, when that didnt work punished us for speaking our own language and enjoying our culture to the point where precious few even speak Gaeilge as a primary language, brutally crushed those who attempted to rebel, ignited a civil war intentionally so they could keep the north, fanned the flames of the Troubles, allowed prisoners to starve to death on hunger strike to send a message, treated us like 2nd class citizens in both our own country and in the UK for years, CONTINUE to fuck over the north, and now attempt to profit off our national holiday by getting really drunk even though the alcohol issues that my country is famous for are due to the above reasons. have a good one
University of Toronto’s faculty of medicine launches a new application program to boost enrolment and reflect the diverse population.
When Dr. Lisa Robinson graduated from the University of Toronto’s medical school in 1991, she was one of two black students in her class.
Twenty-six years later, Chika Oriuwa is the only one in her class of 259 first-year medical students who identifies as black.
Given the diversity of the GTA and the patients these future physicians will be treating, “I guess I was a bit taken aback by that,” says Oriuwa, 23, of Brampton.
So is the university, which on Wednesday announced an initiative aimed at boosting the chronically low number of black students who apply to medical school and go on to become doctors.
“It’s exciting, we’re the first program of this kind in Canada,” says Robinson, chief diversity officer with the faculty of medicine and a physician at Sick Kids Hospital.
“In this day and age in a city like Toronto, we want a class that reflects our population.”
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