i feel stupid, and contagious

Posted by Juliana Britto Schwartz

http://feministing.com/2017/10/18/daily-feminist-cheat-sheet-979/

http://feministing.com/?p=129315

A federal judge ordered the U.S. government to allow an undocumented teenager in its custody to have an abortion, after the Trump administration tried to prevent her from having the procedure. 

This study shows that 75% of victims who speak out against workplace sexual harassment experience some form of retaliation.

Read Shannon Keating’s essay on the sexual harassment of queer women, and the men who say women shouldn’t be queer unless they perform their queerness for male consumption.

New York City just expanded its paid sick leave law to include paid safe days for survivors of gender violence.

Hollywood’s female crew members are sexually harassed, too — and they don’t have the platform of stardom

Parental involvement laws are forcing foster teens to go to court to seek abortions.

In an unusual move, a Minnesota judge has allowed four protestors who shut off two oil pipelines to use the “necessity defense.” They can now argue that the threat of climate change from the pipeline’s oil was so great that their actions were justified.

http://feministing.com/2017/10/18/daily-feminist-cheat-sheet-979/

http://feministing.com/?p=129315

Posted by Jess Fournier

http://feministing.com/2017/10/18/beyond-the-domestic-violence-awareness-vigil/

http://feministing.com/?p=129244

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month — a month dedicated to raising awareness of the fact that an awful lot of people, including an estimated 54% of trans and nonbinary people and at least 50% of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, experience intimate partner violence in their lifetimes.

Domestic Violence Awareness Month (DVAM) encapsulates many of my issues with the contemporary U.S. domestic violence movement: its erasure of the systemic enablers of intimate partner violence, its exclusion of LGBTQ survivors from resources and discussion, and its collusion with law enforcement that perpetrate violence against marginalized survivors and their communities. Events for this month hosted by nonprofits and local governments tend to focus on educating people about the existence of domestic violence through statistics, vigils and events, and public statements by elected officials, including the Rapist-in-Chief, Donald Trump.

These gestures may be well-intentioned (in some cases) and cathartic for some survivors. But they also expose the hypocrisy of institutions that seek to ‘raise awareness’ of intimate partner violence while oppressing survivors of color, queer and trans survivors, poor survivors, and immigrant survivors. Are survivors safer when Boston celebrates DVAM but slashes funding for housing programs and collaborates with ICE? How helpful are DVAM events by law enforcement agencies that routinely perpetrate sexual assault and criminalize survivors of color for protecting themselves and their families from abusers? How about when colleges that ignore Title IX celebrate DVAM?

By focusing on the nebulous goal of “awareness” rather than on the concrete systemic and structural harms that survivors face, DVAM deflects attention from the role that institutions play in perpetrating and facilitating intimate partner violence (and other forms of gender violence). Survivors might be allowed to participate in these events, but they don’t necessarily serve to make us safer or address the causes of violence.

So, in light of this month, I want to highlight survivor-led efforts that offer us alternatives for responding to the gravity of intimate partner violence and struggling for a better world. The anarchist feminist, queer and trans survivor authors of the zine Dangerous Spaces show one set of possibilities to resist the entwined structures of interpersonal and systemic violence that institutions often ignore:

We do not want a feminism that will put us up in a run down state shelter for a short while until we’re “back on our feet.” We want a feminism that will break back into our house we were just kicked out of and tell the landlord he’ll have hell to pay from a mob of angry bitches if he attempts eviction again. And when one of us is raped and murdered for our gender we definitely do not want more empty calls for “justice” and quiet candle-lit vigils… We want a visible expression of exasperation, anger, and frustration that makes obvious that we are finished with these routines: the routines of violence against women and queer people, the routines of quietly shaking our heads at these tragedies, the routines of asking for change. We want a feminism that is not afraid to try new things, that is dynamic enough to know that at times healing comes in the form of vengeance and change comes in the form of destroying what destroys you.

Their actions — shutting down city streets, challenging and naming community perpetrators, providing material support and protection to survivors — are powerful to me because they serve to remind us that violence is never over, never part of a past that can be forgotten. When violence is part of the fabric of the world in which we live, nothing short of total revolution can bring an end to it.

And there are so many ways to enact that revolution on a daily basis: supporting currently incarcerated survivors, demanding immigration justice and economic justice, supporting our friends, reading and learning from other survivors, fighting to abolish prisons and police, and many others. There is no universal model of healing or survival, but we can still support one another and work for our collective liberation.

This October, let’s give the survivors in our lives more than awareness. Honor and respect survivors’ self-determination, rage and grief in the face of interpersonal and state violence. Give time, resources and energy to uplift the voices of survivors on the margins. Awareness is only the beginning: our mourning must come with a promise to continually resist the systems that keep all of us from being free.

“We are not asking for a right to the streets, we are taking them; we are not asking for advertisements that do not objectify women, we’re destroying the commercial mechanisms that objectify women; we are not appealing to male power for an end to rape, but threatening: ‘If you touch me, I will fucking kill you.’” – Dangerous Spaces

Header image credit: Konhee Chang / The Daily Pennsylvanian.

http://feministing.com/2017/10/18/beyond-the-domestic-violence-awareness-vigil/

http://feministing.com/?p=129244

Posted by Meg Sri

http://feministing.com/2017/10/17/u-s-mens-soccer-proves-that-mediocre-men-will-still-earn-more-than-successful-women/

http://feministing.com/?p=129225

Last week, the United States’ men’s soccer team lost 2-1 in a World Cup Qualifier to Trinidad and Tobago, the only team below them in the group standings, sending them crashing out of the Men’s World Cup for the first time since 1986 in what some are calling “the worst loss in the history of U.S. Men’s Soccer.” It seems a good a time as any to remember that it was only in April this year that the U.S. women’s too, lost an important fight: the battle to gain equal pay with the men’s team. And it also seems a good time to remember that while the U.S. men comically crashed out of the World Cup, the women won it in 2015.

The deeper one dives, the more embarrassing the record is. The U.S. women’s team’s record in World Cups the past twenty years includes two victories, one second-place finish, and three third-place finishes. The men’s involves one non-qualification, two exits at the Group Stages, two at the Round of 16, and one high of a quarterfinal finish. The women have lost only two Olympic gold medals between 1996 and 2016. The (under-23, but nonetheless) men did not qualify three times in the same period.

The history of U.S. men’s soccer is far from illustrious in general, especially on the international stage. As FiveThirtyEight points out, “In the 1998 World Cup and the 2006 World Cup — the last two on European soil — it combined for one tie and five losses. In 2015, the team was stunned at home in the Gold Cup semifinal by Jamaica, which at the time was ranked 76th in the world by FIFA.” Meanwhile, the women’s team has been characterized by roaring  successes, entertaining play, stimulating victories, and renewed public interest in soccer. They also now bring in more game revenue than men, bringing in $23 million last year, and turned over 3 times as much profit as the men in 2016. U.S. Soccer predicts the same will happen in 2017 for the women — while the men are expected to turn over a loss of $1 million.

In March 2016, five of the U.S. women’s team players filed a federal complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that U.S. soccer acted discriminatorily in paying its female players less than those on the men’s team. The complaint pointed out some startling figures: women, if they won and including their win bonus, would earn $4,950 per game; the men would earn $5,000 just for showing up (and a whopping $8,166 if they won, rare as that might be). If women won all their games in a year, they’d earn $99,000 — still less than the men’s salary for just showing up and losing every game, at $100,000. And that’s not counting the litany of smaller discriminatory practices: coach flights vs. business class; dangerous artificial turf vs. real fields; and lower per diems and pay for sponsor appearances.

The fight did end in some form of victory in April this year: women’s players got pay raises of over 30%, better bonuses, higher per diems, and other financial benefits. And yet U.S. soccer couldn’t take the final leap and pay a multiple World Cup-winning, tremendously victorious side that is more financially profitable the same amount of money as a mediocre side that crashes out of a World Cup and expects to net a revenue loss.

Last week’s World Cup qualifier loss was a sobering reminder to some soccer fans about systemic problems with U.S. men’s soccer. But to many of us, it is also a sobering reminder to women: you can be twice or thrice as good as men, but you still cannot expect to be treated or paid on par with them.

Header image via. 

http://feministing.com/2017/10/17/u-s-mens-soccer-proves-that-mediocre-men-will-still-earn-more-than-successful-women/

http://feministing.com/?p=129225