Misogyny and Sexism in the News

[Kobi]

You wouldn't think that folks dressing up in Sailor Moon costumes would strike fear into grown adults. And yet, for many in the comics industry, cosplay—“costume play”— seems to produce unusual levels of anxiety and bile. The most recent individual to publicly shout at the X-Men to get off his lawn is artist Patrick Broderick, who wrote on Facebook:

If you're a Cosplay personality, please don't send me a friend request. If you're a convention promoter and you're building your show around cosplay events and mega multiple media guest don't invite me....You bring nothing of value to the shows, and if you're a promoter pushing cosplay as your main attraction you're not helping the industry or comics market..Thank you.

Writer Mark Ellis then suggested that cosplayers had "narcissistic personality disorder" and took a brave stand against "overweight women in Power Girl and Slave Girl Leia costumes posing, posturing and demanding $20 to take a photo of them. A guy I know just said, ‘You’re standing around in public looking like a fool…shove your $20’ and took pictures anyway."

The dynamic here is clear enough. As Sam Maggs writes at The Mary Sue, the superhero comic world has long tilted overwhelmingly towards guys. That's changing though—and cosplay is both a result and a cause. Cosplay combines comics with the stereotypically feminized world of fashion; it's a way for folks to combine a love of Batman or Thor with a love of fabric and sewing and dressing up. As Maggs says, "Cosplay is an industry largely dominated by women; it opens up the world of comics—a world which has overwhelmingly felt exclusionary to girls and women—in a whole new way."

The question is, why do folks like Broderick and Ellis find that threatening? How exactly does someone cosplaying Power-Girl next to your booth damage you? People sometimes make vague claims about loss of revenue, or that the cosplayers don't buy enough comics—though it's hard to figure how more people at a convention filing past your table is going to damage your bottom line. The real vitriol, in any case, as in Ellis's statement, seems to be directed at the sexuality of cosplay, and even more at its artificiality. It’s the same mentality behind the fake geek girl meme—the idea that women cosplayers aren't real fans, and, beyond that, aren't actually real people. As Julia Serano argues in her 2007 book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, the feminine is often denigrated as artificial and sexualized. The cosplayers threaten to undermine the authentic purity and virtue of the comics industry. A woman is getting her picture taken close by—how can we ever take our magic wishing-rings and giant-sized Man-Things seriously again?!

Those giant-sized Man-Things are perhaps more relevant than some cosplay nay-sayers might like to admit. It's true that comics in recent years has tended to define itself as authentic, serious, and male against the frivolous artificiality of cosplay. But in other contexts, it's comics themselves that have been defined as feminized, frivolous, and artificial. Bart Beaty in his 2012 book Comics vs. Art pointed out that high art has often framed comics as "feminized kitsch"—much to the discomfort of comics creators. Pop artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and (more recently) Jeff Koons use comic books as a way to tweak high-art seriousness and the cult of the swaggering expressive male genius. In doing so, they linked comics to gayness, femininity, and camp. Beaty says that the massive success of the Adam West Batman TV series was especially painful for comics fans, since that show "drew heavily on a camp aesthetic." It did this, not least, through its colorful costumes. Ellis scorns the non-stick-thin bodies of cosplayers, but before those folks dressed up, Adam West was proudly sporting his Bat-paunch, to the delight of many a lusty villaineness.

More, according to Beaty, pop art was often validated as masculine itself in comparison to feminized comics. Lichtenstein, he says, has been figured as "a masculinized saviour of commercial culture" in comparison to "popular forms" like comics that are seen as "sentimental and feminized." In the catalogue for the 1993 traveling exhibition High & Low, curators Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, for example, argued that "Pop art saved the comics." Pop art used comics to undermine masculinity, and then, in Beaty's view, built its own masculinity on a vision of itself swooping down to rescue a lower art form in distress.

The backlash to cosplay is in part guys trying to keep girls out of the male clubhouse. But in this context it can also be seen as feminized guys panicking at yet another in a long line of demonstrations that the male clubhouse isn't all that male to begin with. You could argue that cosplay's associations with fashion actually make it more highbrow than comics—the New York fashion runway and the New York gallery scene are more kin than either is to low pulp superhero comics. Cosplay is appropriating superheroes for art, much as pop art has done—and some in comics fear the results.

But they shouldn't. The truth is that cosplay is not a continuation of pop-art denigration by other means. Instead, it's an antidote. Pop art's self-conscious manipulation of comics is only possible, or painful, in a world where comics defines its legitimacy in narrow terms. Lichtenstein is only an outsider co-opting comics if you insist on seeing Lichtenstein as something other than a comics artist himself. Cosplay—like the Batman TV series before it—could be a way for fans to be the pop artists: to cast aside the wearisome performance of legitimacy for a more flamboyant, less agonized fandom. Once you stop neurotically policing boundaries, the question of whether comics or superheroes are masculine or feminine becomes irrelevant. If superheroes and comics are for everyone, that "everyone" automatically includes people of all genders, wearing whatever they wish.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertain...rity/383617/2/

[Kobi]

When it comes to stopping violence against women, actions speak louder than words. So even though there’s increased worldwide awareness about violence against women, the problem won’t be solved unless countries make significant policy and financial changes to support victims, according to a five-part series of studies in The Lancet, one of the world’s premier medical journals.

The series, entitled “Violence Against Women and Girls,” calls the violence a “global public health and clinical problem of epidemic proportions,” and the statistics are bleak. 100-140 million women have undergone female genital mutilation worldwide, and 3 million African girls per year are at risk. 7% of women will be sexually assaulted by someone besides their partner in their lifetimes. Almost 70 million girls worldwide have been married before they turned 18. According to WHO estimates, 30% of women worldwide have experienced partner violence. The researchers said that these problems could only be solved with political action and increased funding, since the violence has continued “despite increased global attention,” implying awareness is not enough.

“No magic wand will eliminate violence against women and girls,” series co-lead Charlotte Watts, founding Director of the Gender Violence and Health Centre at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said in a statement. “But evidence tells us that changes in attitudes and behavior are possible, and can be achieved within less than a generation.”

One of the major problems highlighted in the Lancet series is that much of the current research on violence against women has been conducted in high-income countries, and it’s mostly been focused on response instead of prevention. The study found that the key driver of violence in most middle-and-low income countries is gender inequality, and that it would be near impossible to prevent abuse without addressing the underlying political, economic, and educational marginalization of women.

The study also found that health workers are often uniquely positioned to help victims, since they’re often the first to know about the abuse.

“Health-care providers are often the first point of contact for women and girls experiencing violence,” says another series co-lead, Dr. Claudia Garcia-Moreno, a physician at the WHO, in a statement. “The health community is missing important opportunities to integrate violence programming meaningfully into public health initiatives on HIV/AIDS, adolescent health, maternal health, and mental health.”

The series makes five concrete recommendations to curb the violence against women. The authors urge nations to allocate resources to prioritize protecting victims, change structures and policies that discriminate against women, promote support for survivors, strengthen health and education sectors to prevent and respond to violence, and invest in more research into ways to address the problem. In other words: money, education, and political action are key to protecting the world’s most vulnerable women. Hashtag activism, celebrity songs, and stern PSAs are helpful, but this problem is too complicated to be solved by awareness alone.

“We now have some promising findings to show what works to prevent violence,” said Dr. Cathy Zimmerman from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “We urgently need to turn this evidence into genuine action so that women and girls can live violence-free lives.”

The study comes just in time for the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

http://time.com/3598444/lancet-viole...-women-global/

----------------------


And how much money was wasted on a global study to show what feminists have been saying for centuries?

[Kobi]

Protestors in New York flooded the streets last week, toting signs that blazed with images and phrases about cruel injustice.

Just a week after similar events in Ferguson, a grand jury ruled that Daniel Pantaleo — the NYPD officer who put Eric Garner, a 44-year-old, black, Staten Island man, in a chokehold that led to Garner’s death — should not be brought to trial for his actions.

A failure to indict the police officer responsible for Garner’s unjustifiable, illegal, and unnecessary death signifies why there’s been a breach of trust between communities of color and those tasked with enforcing the laws.

In black American communities, we are holding our breath, waiting for whoever’s next. There is no guarantee that the next victim will be a black male, but there appears to be a guarantee that the victim will be marginalized or forgotten by the mainstream media if she is a girl or woman of color.

The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a non-profit organization whose mission is to defend the human rights of black people, found that every 40 hours, a black man, woman, or child is killed by police, security guards, or self-appointed law enforcers. In fact, since the killing of Mike Brown, more than 14 black teens have been killed by the police, including 12-year-old Tamir Rice, a boy in Cleveland, Ohio who was murdered less than two seconds after police arrived at a playground to answer a 911 call related to a black child carrying a pellet gun. We know another Eric Garner is coming, and it is impossible to prepare for the onslaught of grief that will accompany the next traumatic injustice.

But one of the largest injustices is how little we collectively discuss the many women of color who are also killed by police.

Take Aiyana Jones, 7, who was killed by a Detroit police officer as she slept on her father’s couch. Or Rekia Boyd, 22, whose life ended in Chicago when she was killed by a police officer. Or Yvette Smith, 48, who was unarmed when she was killed by a police officer in Texas. Or Pearlie Smith, 93, who was fatally shot in her home. Or Tarika Wilson, 26, whose one-year-old son was also injured when she was killed by a Ohio police officer. Or Tyisha Miller, 19, who was killed by a police officer in Los Angeles. Or Kathryn Johnson, 92, who was killed by a police officer in Atlanta. Or Gabriella Nevarez, 22, who was killed by a Sacramento police officer. Or Eleanor Bumpurs, 66, who was killed by a police officer in the Bronx. I could go on and on, but you still probably wouldn’t recognize their names.

While we grieve with the families of Brown, Garner, and countless others, black women are tired of being placed at the fringes of the conversations about state-sanctioned violence. Justice can’t only apply to black males.

While some news outlets covered these women’s deaths, many chose to overlook them because they’re women, and more specifically, black women. Their deaths seem to have little value. As writer Victoria Law explains in Bitch magazine, the names of unarmed black women killed by police “very rarely stick in public memory and never gain the same traction as Eric Garner or Michael Brown.” Sexism impacts every aspect of black women’s lives, including how we’re treated, or not addressed, in media after our deaths. Yet our experiences with law enforcement are very similar to that of black men.

As a black woman, I’m not immune to the fear. My heart pounds rapidly every time I see blue-and-red lights flashing in my rearview mirror. I never know if I will be alive when I leave those brief encounters with police officers. One wrong move could cost me my life, and that is a fear that haunts me as I move through the world every day.

If the next victim of police violence is a black woman or girl, her name will probably not resonate as loudly as that of Mike Brown and Eric Garner. Her face won’t adorn posters protesting the mistreatment of black women by police officers, because police violence is often coded as male, as Dr. Treva B. Lindsey of Ohio State University explains.

Prevailing narratives around Black violability and anti-Black racial violence pivot around Black men and boys. Both historically and contemporarily, when many people working towards racial justice around the issue of racial violence, the presumptive victim is a Black male. From lynching to police brutality, the presumed victim is a Black male. Therefore, Black women and girls are viewed as exceptional victims as opposed to perpetual victims of anti-Black racial violence. Our narratives around racial violence, unfortunately, have yet to evolve into ones that are gender inclusive. Black Victim=Black Male.

Female victims of color are marginalized, and always have been. Renowned social justice warrior and organizer Fannie Lou Hamer was savagely beaten by Mississippi police officers in 1963. She developed a blood clot in the eye, damaged kidneys, and a limp that would remain with her for the rest of her life as a result of the beating. Yet, the sexual and physical terrorism committed against Hamer isn’t discussed as often as the repeated arrests of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr or Malcolm X.

Even now, police violence inflicted upon women of color — like Boyd and Jones, who were both unarmed when they were fatally shot by police officers — doesn’t dominate headlines the way the killings of Garner and Brown do. No concrete data has been collected on the number of black women who are killed by law enforcement, and that’s no coincidence; most of the time, we barely know their names. While we grieve with the families of Brown, Garner, and countless others, black women are tired of being placed at the fringes of the conversations about state-sanctioned violence. Justice can’t only apply to black males.

Social justice leaders are organizing and meeting with Congressional and international leaders to push toward laws that will insure that people of color are safe to stand in front of convenience stores without being choked to death. But as we wait for those laws to be seen as necessary, and we wait for police officers to wear body cameras, and we wait for a shift in how police officers are trained, we also wait for female victims of color to receive equal acknowledgement.

Native New Yorkers, like me, know how brutal the New York Police Department is. We’ve lived through Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Kimani Gray, and the countless others who’ve lost their lives at the hands of those designated to protect and serve us. Eric Garner is the newest member of that lineage of men of color who are killed by the New York Police Department, and whose families have to watch their loved ones receive minimal justice. All black women request is that our deaths matter too.

http://www.bustle.com/articles/52433...-hear-about-it

[Kobi]

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."

The bill contains exceptions for women who become pregnant as the result of rape or incest—but there are caveats.

"Just like any rape, you have to report it, and you have to prove it," Brattin tells Mother Jones. "So you couldn't just go and say, 'Oh yeah, I was raped' and get an abortion. It has to be a legitimate rape."

Brattin adds that he is not using the term "legitimate rape" in the same way as former Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), who famously claimed that women couldn't get pregnant from a "legitimate rape" because "the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down."

"I'm just saying if there was a legitimate rape, you're going to make a police report, just as if you were robbed," Brattin says. "That's just common sense." Under his bill, he adds, "you have to take steps to show that you were raped…And I'd think you'd be able to prove that." The bill contains no provision establishing standards for claiming the rape or incest exceptions. It also doesn't state any specific penalties for violating the law nor say whether a penalty would be imposed on the woman seeking the abortion or the abortion provider.

Missouri is home to only one abortion clinic, based in St. Louis. Each year, legislators target the clinic with dozens of new restrictions. In 2014, the GOP-controlled Legislature approved a bill requiring women seeking an abortion to wait 72 hours between the initial consultation and the procedure. It's the longest abortion waiting period in the county.

A group of Democratic lawmakers in Missouri found the onslaught of anti-abortion bills so ridiculous that in 2012 they introduced a bill to ban vasectomies except to save the life of a man. If conservative male lawmakers imagined jumping through hoops to obtain reproductive services, the thinking went, they would see the absurdity of their anti-abortion crusade.

Not Brattin. The father of five says that his recent vasectomy was the inspiration for this bill.

"When a man goes in for that procedure—at least in the state of Missouri—you have to have a consent form from your spouse in order to have that procedure done," he says. "Here I was getting a normal procedure that has nothing to do with another human being's life, and I needed to get a signed form…But on ending a life, you don't. I think that's pretty twisted."

A spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, a group of clinics that perform vasectomies, says that there is no law in Missouri requiring a man to get another person's permission for a vasectomy. Individual providers sometimes require a patient to have his partner's consent. (Planned Parenthood of Missouri does not.) Brattin saved the document his wife signed and intends to share it with other lawmakers when it comes time to promote his bill.

Brattin notes that his bill also contains an exception for cases in which continuing the pregnancy would endanger the life of the mother. Women whose partners have died can sign a sworn affidavit to that effect.

When asked if he would support an exception for women whose partners are abusive, Brattin says, "I haven't really thought about that aspect of it." But he adds, "What does that have to do with the child's life? Just because it was an abusive relationship, does that mean the child should die?" Brattin notes that women in these situations can obtain protective custody once the child is born.

Asked about Casey v. Planned Parenthood, a 1992 Supreme Court decision striking down a requirement that a woman inform her husband if she haves an abortion, Brattin says he doesn't believe the ruling affects his bill. Because Missouri has laws requiring men to pay child support during a pregnancy, he contends, a bill requiring a man's involvement in an abortion should be constitutional.

In 2013, Brattin sponsored a bill to give intelligent design and "destiny" the same amount of attention in Missouri textbooks as evolution. Brattin has cosponsored many anti-abortion bills, including several measures restricting medication abortions that passed the Missouri Legislature in recent years. His latest bill, which would allow a man to veto a woman's decision to get an abortion, is identical to a measure Brattin proposed in April that died in committee.

"This bill is insulting and a danger to women in abusive relationships," says M'Evie Mead, the director of statewide organizing for Missouri's Planned Parenthood affiliated. "That's very much our concern. But when it comes to abortion, Missouri legislators are always trying to outdo each other."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...aving-abortion

[Kobi]

Tamara Loerstcher was suffering from an untreated thyroid condition and depression and had begun to self medicate with drugs when, in late July 2014, she suspected she might also be pregnant. Loerstcher, uninsured at the time, went to an Eau Claire, Wisconsin, hospital for medical treatment and to confirm her pregnancy.

After submitting to a urinalysis, Loerstcher disclosed her past drug use to hospital workers. But instead of caring for Loerstcher, who as it turns out was 14 weeks pregnant, hospital workers had her jailed.

Those are the allegations in a soon-to-be-filed federal civil rights lawsuit by attorneys from National Advocates for Pregnant Women, the Carr Center for Reproductive Justice at New York University School of Law, and the Perkins Coie law firm.

Loerstcher and her attorneys, in a call with reporters, detailed her experience, including her alleged mistreatment by Wisconsin officials and the ongoing deprivation of Loerstcher’s constitutional rights under a Wisconsin law that grants authorities the power to involuntarily detain and confine a pregnant woman for substance use if she “habitually lacks self-control” and her substance use poses a “substantial risk” to the health of an egg, embryo, or fetus.

The Wisconsin policy is similar in nature to radical “personhood” laws pushed in state legislatures controlled by anti-choice lawmakers. “Personhood” amendments, which would outlaw abortion at any stage of pregnancy, were roundly rejected by voters in several states on Election Day.

According to Loertscher and her attorneys, unbeknownst to her, as hospital workers were preparing a prescription to treat Loertscher’s thyroid condition, they were also initiating unborn child protection proceedings on behalf of Loertscher’s then 14-week-old fetus.

Loertscher and her attorneys claim that within days of Loertscher seeking care, hospital workers had already turned over Loerstcher’s hospital records to the state without Loerstcher’s knowledge or consent. They also claim that with those records in hand, state officials filed a petition accusing Loerstcher of abuse of an unborn child and held a hearing in which the state had appointed an attorney, known as a guardian ad litem, for the 14-week-old fetus, but granted Loerstcher no meaningful representation.

At the hearing, Loertscher and her attorneys allege she was ordered by the court into in-patient treatment even though she had not used drugs recently and voluntarily sought medical care. When Loerstcher refused to go to in-patient treatment, she was held in contempt of court and sent to jail, where she was held for 17 days without prenatal care and subject to abuse and harassment.

“This was my first pregnancy, so I didn’t know what to expect,” Loerstcher told reporters. “I was having lots of cramping and a lot of stress from everything and they [jail officials] wouldn’t allow me to see the doctor. They told me I would have to see a jail-appointed doctor who told me she wanted me to take a pregnancy test to confirm the pregnancy even though that’s why I was in jail, because I was pregnant. They knew that’s why I was there.”

Loerstcher claims she refused the pregnancy test, and in response, correction officials put her in solitary confinement and threatened to use a taser on her. “The jail doctor told me if I chose to miscarry, there wasn’t anything they could do about it anyways,” Loertscher said through tears.

About a week after Loerstcher’s release, she says she got a notice in the mail from the state stating they had found she had engaged in child abuse.

“It was really devastating to get that letter,” said Loerstcher. Unless it’s overturned on appeal, Loerstcher’s name will appear on the state’s child abuse registry for life. That would mean Loerstcher, who is a certified nurse’s aid, would be unable to work in her field, noted her attorney, and that she would be barred from ever volunteering at her son’s school after he is born in January. “This has very serious ramifications for her life and economic stability long term,” said Sara Ainsworth, director of legal advocacy at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women and counsel for Loerstcher.

In order to be released from jail, Loertscher had to sign a consent decree agreeing to additional drug tests, so she remains under state custody to some extent, her lawyer said.

Wisconsin Act 292, known as the “cocaine mom” law, extends the court’s juvenile jurisdiction to include “fertilized eggs, embryos, and pregnant women at all stages of pregnancy where the pregnant woman ‘habitually lacks self-control’ in the use of alcohol or controlled substances ‘to a severe degree’ such that there is a ‘substantial risk’ that the health of the egg, embryo, fetus, or child upon birth will be ‘seriously affected.’”

In effect, Act 292 grants “personhood” rights to fertilized eggs and embryos by granting the state power to initiate child protective actions against the expectant mother anytime the state believes she has substance use issues that will “seriously affect” the health of the egg, embryo, fetus, or child.

Under Act 292 Wisconsin officials have broad authority to arrest and detain the expectant mother for up to the duration of her pregnancy and can appoint an attorney, known as a guardian ad litem to represent the best interests of the “unborn child,” like they allegedly did in Loerstcher’s case. But because the law empowers the state to act through the juvenile courts rather than the criminal courts, much of the proceedings and findings are sealed. “This law operates through juvenile court, so everything that happens is essentially secret,” said Ainsworth. “There’s no way to know the full extent of how this law has been used against pregnant women in Wisconsin.”

While the total numbers of Wisconsin women swept up under Act 292 may not be known, Loerstcher’s case is not the first.

Last year, attorneys from the National Advocates for Pregnant Women filed a lawsuit on behalf of Alicia Beltran, another Wisconsin woman involuntarily detained at a drug treatment facility despite no evidence she had used drugs while pregnant. The attorneys sued in federal court, but that case was eventually dismissed as moot and without a ruling on the merits of her claims after Wisconsin officials released Beltran out of custody. In the order dismissing Beltran’s claim, the court noted that ”if Beltran’s allegations are true, what happened to her is extremely disturbing.”

Wisconsin is one of a number of states that have some kind of process in place that allows the state to effectively suspend the civil rights of pregnant people in the name of protecting against fetal harm. Most recently, Tennessee enacted a law that essentially empowers prosecutors to charge pregnant people with fetal assault for a host of activities, including drug use.

Meanwhile, South Carolina and Alabama through judicial decisions have made various criminal laws applicable to pregnant women, while both Minnesota and South Dakota amended their civil commitment laws to include a special process for committing pregnant people if they are determined to be a risk to their developing fetus.

But of all the state laws punishing pregnant people, Wisconsin’s is the most broad, said Ainsworth, and no court has yet ruled on its constitutionality.

http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/20...tm_campaign=FB

[Kobi]

[Kobi]

Acclaimed Novelist Sells 30 Million Books, Is Remembered For Her Physical Appearance In Obituary