Misogyny and Sexism in the News

[Kobi]

pregnant woman is just a "host" that should not have the right to end her pregnancy, Virginia State Sen. Steve Martin (R) wrote in a Facebook rant defending his anti-abortion views.

Martin, the former chairman of the Senate Education and Health Committee, wrote a lengthy post about his opinions on women's bodies on his Facebook wall last week in response to a critical Valentine's Day card he received from reproductive rights advocates.

"I don't expect to be in the room or will I do anything to prevent you from obtaining a contraceptive," Martin wrote. "However, once a child does exist in your womb, I'm not going to assume a right to kill it just because the child's host (some refer to them as mothers) doesn't want it." Martin then changed his post on Monday afternoon to refer to the woman as the "bearer of the child" instead of the "host."

Martin said Monday that he edited the original wording calling women hosts because people took it the wrong way, even though he felt it was clear he was being sarcastic. "I don't see how anyone could have taken it the wrong way," he said. "It was me playing their argument back to them. Obviously I consider pregnant women to be mothers."

Tarina Keene, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia, told The Huffington Post in an email that Martin's rant reveals the "contempt" that anti-abortion lawmakers have for women.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...n_4847959.html

[Gemme]

Youtube assaults.

[Kobi]

An 18-year-old who attempted to murder three women in revenge for the fact he was still a virgin has been jailed for 21 years.

Ben Moynihan, of Knightstone Court, Portsmouth, was found guilty in January of stabbing the women as they walked home alone.

They were attacked in separate incidents in Portsmouth last summer.

Moynihan must serve an additional five years on licence after his sentence ends, Winchester Crown Court heard.

During his trial, jurors heard Moynihan had difficulties finding a girlfriend and losing his virginity.

'Chilling and disturbing'

Police found a note which read "all women needs to die" and a journal containing descriptions of violence Moynihan dubbed his "diary of evil".

They also uncovered letters in which Moynihan said his frustration at not being able to lose his virginity had led to the attacks.

He wrote: "I was planning to murder mainly women as an act of revenge because of the life they gave me, I'm still a virgin at 17," he wrote.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-31765086

[Kobi]

BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Brazil, where a woman is killed every two hours, is imposing tougher punishments on those who murder women and girls, as part of a government bid to stem a rise in gender killings.

President Dilma Rousseff said the new law gave a legal definition to the crime of femicide - the killing of a woman by a man because of her gender - and set out jail sentences of 12 to 30 years for convicted offenders.

The law, signed by Rousseff on Monday, also includes longer jail terms for crimes committed against pregnant women, girls under 14, women over 60 and people with disabilities.

Brazil joins 15 other Latin American countries which have brought in laws against femicide in recent years.

"This law typifies femicide as a grave crime and identifies it as a specific crime against women. It's a way to talk about this problem, make it visible by giving it a name and increasing sanctions for this crime," said Nadine Gasman, head of the agency United Nations Women in Brazil.

"It has taken us a long time to say that the killing of a woman is a different phenomenon. Men are killed in the street, women are killed in the home. Men are killed with guns, women with knives and hands," Gasman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.

The number of women murdered in Brazil rose by 230 percent from 1980 to 2010, government figures show.

An average of 4,500 women are killed in the country every year, Gasman said.

"Femicide is part of the big increase in violence in general in Brazil. The underlying causes are discrimination against women and inequality, and in Brazil black women are the poorest and the most discriminated against," she said.

More research is needed to better understand the reasons for the big increase in gender killings in Brazil, Gasman said.

Femicide is a widespread problem across Latin America.

More than half the 25 countries with the highest femicide rates are in the Americas, according to a 2012 report by the Small Arms Survey, an independent research project in Geneva, based on 2004 to 2009 figures.

It is common for victims of femicide to have a long history of domestic violence and the perpetrators are often the victims' current or former partners, family members or friends, U.N. Women says.

"Our experience in the region and in Brazil shows femicide is part of a cycle of violence and it's the most intense form of violence ... that becomes graver and graver. It doesn't come out of the blue," Gasman said.

Femicide also stems from a macho culture that tends to condone violence against women and blames women for it, which in turn leads to low prosecution rates for gender-related crimes.

"This is a further step in Brazil's legislation in the fight against sexism that kills women daily in our country," Brazilian congresswoman Maria do Rosario said on her Facebook page, after the femicide law was introduced.

The challenge now is to ensure that the law is put into practice and that police, prosecutors and forensic experts are trained in how to investigate cases of femicide.

"It's always a challenge implementing laws but having this law makes it compulsory to investigate this crime with a gender perspective," Gasman said.

http://www.trust.org/item/20150310173857-1nfvn

[Kobi]

Last year, an anonymous entrepreneur detailed on Forbes.com the many obstacles—and sometimes outright harassment—she faced when trying to raise money from venture capitalists while female. There were unwanted back massages and a pitch meeting at which she was asked, “Did your daddy give you money?”

It's not just the old guard doing the discriminating, she wrote:

Justin Mateen ... stated [allegedly] that having a young female cofounder at Tinder “makes the company seem like a joke” and “devalues” it. Or the comments of the male 20-something Twitter employee, who told me, “You should really hire a nerdy looking dude to represent your company publicly. You know, to make up for your looks.”

Women are now the majority of college students and about half of all managers in the broader workforce, but in the startup world, they number comparatively few. According to the Kauffman Foundation, they account for only about 16 percent of employers, and they make up only 10 percent of founders of so-called “high-growth” firms—startups that quickly add workers rather than fizzling out. Overall, women own only 36 percent of all small businesses.

The reasons for this disparity are hotly debated in the tech world. Some blame the stereotype that women are supposedly less tolerant of risk, or that they prioritize motherhood over the punishing hours of startup life.
"They didn't know what to do with me."

Others point to the hyper-macho atmosphere of Silicon Valley and other venture hubs. Just this week, interim Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, a former junior partner at the investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, testified in a lawsuit against her former employer that she was allegedly denied a promotion because of her gender. Among the issues involved are whether Pao's personality was deemed too "prickly" and why the company organized a men-only ski trip.

Lakshmi Balachandra, now a professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College, traversed this cultural divide when she worked at two venture capital firms—one mostly male, the other mostly female—in the late 90s. While at the male firm, occasionally entrepreneurs would assume she was an assistant, she said, or they would ask her out in the middle of meetings. But mostly, the firm's partners, "didn't know what to do with me. Like they were a little more formal," she said.

"Did it feel like they were trying really hard not to be sexist?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "That's a perfect way to put it."

One of the biggest reasons more women don’t start businesses is that female entrepreneurs have a more difficult time raising money. The Kauffman Foundation notes that, "For male entrepreneurs, 60 percent of startup funding was raised from outside sources, such as bank loans or angel investors, compared to 48 percent for women entrepreneurs. Women entrepreneurs are recipients of just 19 percent of angel funding and even less of venture capital funding.” A 2014 Babson College report similarly found that, although things are getting better, companies with a female CEO only received 3 percent of total venture capital dollars in the previous two years.

Fiona Murray, the associate dean of innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, recently conducted an experiment in which participants evaluated a video pitch from a new company that used slides, an identical script, and either a male or female voice-over. The male voice was 40 percent more likely to receive funding, as Murray wrote in the Boston Globe. “In a follow-up experiment, we found that evaluators particularly favor pitches from attractive men, and that attractive women do worse than unattractive men and women,” she added."Evaluators particularly favor pitches from attractive men, and that attractive women do worse than unattractive men and women.”

Sarah Thebaud, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara, decided to try to determine why this gender gap in startup funding persists. In three experiments, she tested what a group of 178 college students thought about a series of business plans, and indirectly, the gender of the business owners behind them.

The study, published last month in the journal Social Forces, was conducted with two types of business plans: an “innovative” one and a “non-innovative” one. The non-innovative business was a new iteration of a model that’s been proven to work before (a typical wine store), while the innovative one presented an entirely new idea (a store that provides customers the ingredients, tools, and guidance to make and bottle their own wine.)

“Most businesses tend to replicate others that are similar—one pizza place may be a little different from another, but basically they’re all serving the same thing,” Thebaud explained in an article about the study in a UCSB publication. Thebaud presented the subjects with the same innovative and non-innovative business plans, but she manipulated the gender of the business owner, listing it as either Laura, Julie, David, or Jason.

The results suggest that investors are less likely to back female entrepreneurs because they don’t think they’re as smart as men are. The participants thought the non-innovative female business owner was less competent than the innovative one, but the level of ingenuity didn’t matter for the competence ratings of the male entrepreneurs. The non-innovative women were also rated as less competent than similarly run-of-the-mill men.

Thebaud tested other potential reasons the female entrepreneurs might have been discredited, like perceived likability or commitment, but they didn’t hold up.

To Thebaud, the fact that the innovative women, but not men, had higher competence ratings than their less-innovative peers suggests that women who launch especially intriguing ventures—not just a pie shop, but a paleo pie shop—seem more “authentically entrepreneurial.” The risky nature of their businesses might broadcast these women's resemblance to men.

“It signals to people that she is, indeed, aggressive and outgoing, willing to take risks and push barriers, which is what people often think women might not be willing to do,” Thebaud said.

It's worth noting that on some platforms, such as Kickstarter, cash is more likely to flow to women than to men. Still, Thebaud's results are troubling: They suggest that female founders are at an overall fundraising disadvantage unless their ideas are mind-blowing While some startups are revolutionary, most are ordinary businesses that aren’t especially sexy but make their backers (and hopefully a handful of employees) some money. For every new Facebook, there are scores of boring, yet profitable, pizzerias or inventory-management software systems. Apparently, women aren't taken as seriously when they pitch them.

Balachandra recently conducted a study that echoed Thebaud's findings. For her research, which is currently under review for publication, Balachandra examined how venture capitalists reacted to one-minute pitches from male and female startup founders in various industries. The main factor that determined whether the entrepreneurs were successful, she found, was how stereotypically "masculine" they behaved. The entrepreneurs—male and female—who were confident, stern, strong, and bold were much more likely to win funding for their ventures. The ones who were more stereotypically female, which to Balachandra's team meant they acted happier, kinder, and more excited, tended to lose. Importantly, there was no gender gap: The manly women performed better than the effeminate men did.

Balachandra thinks the explanation might lie in the fact that venture capitalists tend to invest in people who are similar to them—and all but 6 percent of VCs are men. Investors spend hours coaching their financial charges, so they might prioritize the type of fraternal chemistry that comes with interacting with someone of the same sex. "A VC will say, 'I only want to invest in someone I can have dinner with,'" Balachandra said.

What's more, female entrepreneurs often pitch businesses that appeal more to women than to men—and male VCs simply don't bother to try to understand them.

Balachandra says one solution is to breed more female venture capitalists—and keep existing ones from quitting. When she was working in the industry in the 90s, she started a networking group for fellow female investors in her area. None of the women in the group are still working in venture capital, she said.

And, she added, male investors need to do a better job finding the female entrepreneurs who are worthy of their time and money. Too often, male investors will rely on male-bonding type activities to pick their entrepreneurs, she says. "But you're assuming that just because you're sailing with someone that they're also going to be a good entrepreneur."

"[VCs] say 'women don't seek me out,' but a lot of women aren't in those circles," she explained. "You're not making an effort."

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...#disqus_thread

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

In 2015 it is kind of flabbergasting to see the same sexist and misogynistic behavior as I did in the 1960's. With all the female and male parents jumping on the "Im a feminist" bandwagon these days, one has to wonder exactly who is teaching their daughters and sons this behavior. (Yes Sheldon, that was sarcasm.)

[Kobi]

(WOMENSENEWS)--Gender violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo and other conflict zones around the world is a subject of continual research and education through witness testimonials, podcasts and information presented by the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

But this year the museum took a look back, delving into a topic from history that, surprisingly, is entirely new–pivotal research about the rape of Jewish women during the Holocaust, described in a new book by two female scholars.

"Rape does not just happen," said Bridget Conley-Zilkic, director of research and projects for the division that guides the museum's genocide prevention programs, at a special event in Manhattan, N.Y., about the new book. "It is a tool that perpetrators use to reach their ends. We honor the history of those who suffered and those who died in the Holocaust by changing our world today."

The rape and sexual abuse of Jewish women in the Holocaust has been a subject that is so taboo that it has taken 65 years for the first English language book on the subject to make its way to the public.

"One question we get a lot is: 'Why did it take so long?' And, for that you have to understand how it came about," said Rochelle G. Saidel, co-editor with Sonja M. Hedgepeth of "Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust," a multidisciplinary anthology released by Brandeis University Press in December 2010.

In 2006, during a rare seminar about women and the Holocaust at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial, Saidel and Hedgepeth, both accomplished historians, mentioned, in passing, sexual abuse.

Saidel said, "This very illustrious Holocaust scholar raised his hand and said, 'There were no Jewish women who were raped during the Holocaust. How can you say such a thing? Where are the documents? Where is the proof?'"

Not a Lone Voice

His voice was not alone. For decades, a myth held sway that the Nazis didn't rape Jewish women because it violated German rules on "race" mixing. Others asserted that Jewish women who were raped must have colluded with the Nazis for food and that women, especially attractive ones, who survived the death camps voluntarily engaged in sexual barter.

Saidel and Hedgepeth knew rape was not documented in the same way as the number of trains that traveled to a concentration camp, but they sought out scholars from seven countries and collected 16 essays, drawing upon oral histories, literature, psychoanalysis, eyewitness reports and diaries.

The stories of rape and sexual abuse began to emerge as if they were old photographic film waiting for the right chemicals, and long-erased pictures of Jewish women who had suffered sexual abuse began to emerge.

Jewish women were raped and sexually abused by Nazi guards, but also by liberators, people who hid them, aid givers, partisans and even fellow prisoners. Judy Weiszenberg Cohen, an Auschwitz survivor living in Canada, told the editors that the "fear of rape" was omnipresent in the concentration camp.

"The exact number of women who experienced sexual molestation during the Holocaust cannot be determined … and the rapists by and large did not leave documents testifying to their actions," writes Nomi Levenkron, a human rights attorney in Israel, in an essay in the book. Most women who survived preferred silence, she said, fearing that they would be stigmatized in their communities.

"This is about all of our humanity. After I read the manuscript, I became kind of obsessed with it," said Gloria Steinem, the renowned feminist writer and advocate, who sponsored two events in New York this year to draw attention to the publication. "I thought, 'It's 70 years later. Why didn't we know this?' For all of the people to whom it happened, to be victimized is one thing--to be shamed, as if it was your fault, is another profound and deep oppression."

Raped and Killed

Many sexually abused women were raped and then simply killed.

Author Moinka J. Faschka of Kent State University in Ohio, one of the contributors to the book, cites survivor Harry Koltun, who said in an interview: "[T]he Gestapo SS came in and took out a few Jewish girls, they took them into a forest and they never came back. They did what they had to do sexually, and they killed them. Nice, nice looking girls."

At a presentation at the Anne Frank Center USA in New York, the book's authors said that previously the barriers to telling the stories of sexual abuse have been tremendous. Some Holocaust scholars believed that segmenting out rape stories–and even women's stories unrelated to sexual violence--would sever women from the community by focusing on one group when all Jews, regardless of gender, were targeted for persecution. Rape was not included in the Nuremberg Trials when Nazi officials were charged with war crimes.

In other cases, women feared they would be considered "impure" or be ostracized by their families.

"I have been interviewing Holocaust survivors in Israel since '78, but it didn't even occur to me to ask about sexual assault," said Eva Fogelman, a psychologist in New York City. "These people had lost so much of their dignity and privacy. I didn't want to take that last bit of privacy away from them."

For this book, Fogelman identified 1,040 testimonies of the 52,000 in the Shoah Foundation collection at the University of Southern California that mention rape or fear of rape.

"What you have is women who were raped talk about it in bits or pieces. Or, 'I know a woman and this happened to her,' – a way of indicating this happened, but not implicating themselves," Fogelman said.

This book, said co-editor Hedgepeth, is only the beginning of the exploration of this sensitive topic.

"I'm starting to feel from conversations that there will be more that comes out of this," she said.

http://womensenews.org/story/our-his...taboo?page=0,0

[Allison W]

Originally Posted by Kobi

Balachandra recently conducted a study that echoed Thebaud's findings. For her research, which is currently under review for publication, Balachandra examined how venture capitalists reacted to one-minute pitches from male and female startup founders in various industries. The main factor that determined whether the entrepreneurs were successful, she found, was how stereotypically "masculine" they behaved. The entrepreneurs—male and female—who were confident, stern, strong, and bold were much more likely to win funding for their ventures. The ones who were more stereotypically female, which to Balachandra's team meant they acted happier, kinder, and more excited, tended to lose. Importantly, there was no gender gap: The manly women performed better than the effeminate men did.

I might be the odd one out where my values are concerned, but I actually find this somewhat less worrying than Thebaud's findings, if only because of the part I bolded. You mentioned the issue of what kind of parents are teaching their children the behaviours mentioned in the article. I've actually been thinking for a while now that what is desperately needed is for today's parents to raise up a generation of aggressive young women. It pleases me in a kind of fucked-up way to hear that evidence suggests it could deliver desirable results, at least in this one particular arena.

[Kobi]

There are various articles on Gamer Gate in this thread. Now, it appears, the truth is finally coming to the surface.

What if a stalker had an army? Zoe Quinn’s ex-boyfriend was obsessed with destroying her reputation—and thousands of online strangers were eager to help.


-------------------------
The first thing Eron Gjoni said after sitting down across from me at Veggie Galaxy in December was that he would probably violate his gag order if he talked to me. Then he talked for the next three hours, and again and again over the next three months.

Gjoni can be relentless that way. And in others. He maintains incessant eye contact from behind a tangle of dark, wavy hair. He is intensely focused. Just ask Zoe Quinn, the object of his unwanted obsession.

In September 2014, Quinn, 27, appeared in Boston Municipal Court to ask Judge Jonathan Tynes for a restraining order against Gjoni, her ex-boyfriend. In a handwritten affidavit to the court, Quinn tried to explain what had happened over the past month. After their brief romance ended, she noted, Gjoni “wrote and published a long post about my sex life and private dealings to several websites that he knew had a history of harassing me.”

Quinn is a video-game designer and, like many women in the business, routinely receives misogynistic threats from strangers. Gjoni, Quinn contended, was aware that his blog post would result in her being harassed and stalked, and she claimed he had published it in order “to damage my professional reputation as an independent artist.”

What’s more, she told the judge, the results had been particularly severe: Since Gjoni’s initial blog post, “I have received numerous death and rape threats from an anonymous mob that [Gjoni] had given details to,” she wrote. “My personal info like my home address, phone number, emails, passwords, and those of my family has been widely distributed, alongside nude photos of me, and several of my professional accounts and those of my colleagues have been hacked.”


Quinn understated the facts. The thousands of threats, which she continues to receive daily, terrified her. Tweets such as “Im not only a pedophile, ive raped countless teens, this zoe bitch is my next victim, im coming slut” spoke for themselves. Messages such as “could kill yourself. We don’t need cunts like you in this world” preyed on the common knowledge that Quinn struggled with depression; she’d won acclaim for creating an impressionistic video game called Depression Quest. Forced to flee her Dorchester apartment, she spent more than six months hiding in friends’ homes. In her affidavit, Quinn struggled to explain to the judge who was behind these threats: They were anonymous, faceless, and they could be anywhere. “Eron has coached this mob multiple times, made multiple social media accounts to smear my name publicly, and has stoked the fire of this on many occasions and doesn’t seem to be stopping,” Quinn told the court. “I am in fear of him.”

Judge Tynes asked if Quinn had sought help from the police. She had, in fact— numerous times. She told Boston police officers what Gjoni had done, including her allegation that he had turned violent the last time they had sex over the summer, just before their breakup, while she was at a conference in San Francisco. Judge Tynes told Quinn he wanted to help, but stumbled to find the right words as he scribbled down the conditions of a restraining order against Gjoni, barring him from posting any further information about Quinn’s personal life online or encouraging—“What’s the first adjective?” the judge asked. “Something mob—What was the mob?”

“Uh, hate,” Quinn replied.

“Hate mob—all right,” said the judge. “I’ll put that in quotations. Good luck, ma’am. So long.”

And now here Gjoni sat before me. Over the past three months, according to Quinn, he had continued to defy Tynes’s order, divulging further details about her personal life and forcing her to return to court in Boston again and again to address his repeated violations. As of April, the court had formally charged him with four.


There’s a haunting resonance to Gjoni’s choice of location for our meeting. This is where he and Quinn first hung out in person: It’s where his obsession with her began. He’s come back to the beginning, and he wants me to know that Quinn is a “hypocrite,” a “compulsive liar,” and an “asshole.”

Gjoni is a highly cerebral, 25-year-old software developer who was recently fired from Massachusetts General Hospital’s robotics lab. He chooses his words deliberately, spending much of our time together describing the month after his breakup with Quinn: how he extracted details from her Facebook, text, and email accounts; how he tracked her movements and shadowed her conversations. The process he described to me sounded as if he were gathering the pieces of a horrible machine, with each component designed to be as damaging to Quinn as possible. Eventually, the machine would have a name: “The Zoe Post,” a 9,425-word screed he published in August.

But before he emptied the contents of Quinn’s private life into the gaping maw of a bloodthirsty Internet, back before he instigated the most vicious online backlash against feminism in a generation, there was a first date. A date that began, not unlike many other 21st-century first dates, on OkCupid. The algorithms spoke: Gjoni and Quinn were a 98 percent match.

Read the rest of the story here.

[Gemme]

Group of Men Disrupt Female Reporter's Interview and what she did about it.

I don't get how they don't get it. How stupid can one be?

[Smiling]

I was so disgusted when I read this today. They made complete fools of themselves. And only of themselves.

And it was my understanding that at least one of the men has now lost his 6 figure job as a result of this little stunt. Even though I take no pleasure in "retribution" per se, I can't help but feel that it couldn't have happened to a more deserving individual.

Call me a naive optimist, but perhaps they will have learned a valuable lesson from all of this? (Of course, I won't be holding my breath or anything....)

At any rate, I think the reporter handled herself with a lot of dignity and grace given the circumstances.

This behavioral display was really appalling and disheartening.

Originally Posted by Gemme

Group of Men Disrupt Female Reporter's Interview and what she did about it.

I don't get how they don't get it. How stupid can one be?

[Soon]

4 dudes and an accused rapist -- what some folks think passes for the "left" these days

[homoe]

Originally Posted by Gemme

Group of Men Disrupt Female Reporter's Interview and what she did about it.

I don't get how they don't get it. How stupid can one be?

When I see jackasses like these, my heart really goes out to straight women who also no doubt have to deal with these types within the dating pool!

[Kätzchen]

A decade has gone by, since Greyson first started this thread, way back in the year of 2010.

I'm bumping Greyson's thread because there might be some new members in our community who desire reading how Misogyny and Sexism has been part of American culture, for way too long.

Even today, as I read news articles on major news websites, I read where the GOP is re-writing election law, rewriting women's rights concerning abortion, and basically propelling Misogyny and Sexism to the forefront of American politics and how it affects women in our everyday lives.

There is a lot to take in, reading posts from Greyson's forum thread, but there is also so much to do. So, I am bumping this thread for new members as well as for members who have been here for a long, long time.


~K.

[Stone-Butch]

Best book I have ever read on the topic.

WOMENS MADNESS; MYSOGENY OR MENTAL ILLNESS.

Jane Ussher

From witches to todays psychiatry and all in between. If your library has it or check it out on Amazon this book is worth ever penny. It took me about a year to find a copy to purchase. (used).

Check out Freud and another book Anna.... Mysogeny as all get out.

If women beat and killed and castrated men and boys (not possible) then the laws would turn so strict that capital punishment would not be enough to satisfy the multitude of MEN. Rape and murder women and little girls. You might get years but not many. The worst I ever heard was a judge had a male come before him for forcing a 10 yr old to give him oral sex. The judges opinion, "well at least she is still a virgin". OMG