For once it's not the image of Miley Cyrus herself that is controversial. It's the woman lying next to her. In a new advertising campaign for Marc Jacobs, Miley and two female models pose on a moonlit beach, Miley sitting up, staring moodily into the middle distance, a woman standing behind her, while another lies on the sand. This model isn't reclining happily, or curled up asleep; she is flat on her back, hair partially covering her face, with the stiff, sightless demeanour of a body in the morgue. A beautifully dressed one, of course.

This ad campaign was released a day after the latest cover of US magazine Entertainment Weekly, which shows the two stars of upcoming film Gone Girl lying on a gurney. Ben Affleck is fully dressed and alert, curled awkwardly around Rosamund Pike, who is in a bra and slip, pale, wide-eyed with surprise, very much dead. A tag is tied carefully around her toe.

This isn't the first time dead women have been used in fashion or entertainment, of course. Over the years female corpses, especially beautiful female corpses, have become a staple of fashion shoots, advertising campaigns and TV shows – with sexual and fatal violence against women a favourite of TV programmes looking to boost a waning audience or build a new one.

Last year Vice magazine decided to illustrate their Women in Fiction issue with a fashion shoot depicting a range of well-known writers in the throes of killing themselves, or trying to: Sylvia Plath kneeling in front of an oven; Virginia Woolf standing in a stream, clutching a large stone; Dorothy Parker bleeding heavily into a sink. The fashion credits were included in full, down to the pair of tights used as a noose.

FAQ: Both are 100% functional. What I was born with is called Diphallia. I did NOT absorb a twin. It's not genetic or inherited. I am bisexual and in a committed relationship with a man and a woman, but have permission to stray only with James Franco... wherever he is.

HOW TO TALK TO A 'BROCIALIST'

Example: “He said my paper on the exploitation of female prostitutes was ‘insufficiently class-conscious.’ What a brocialist.”

Who uses it: funny feminists/Reddit commenters/brocialists trying to disarm their critics


The “brocialist” is generally a good leftist. His heart is probably in the right place. But he has a gigantic blind spot when it comes to women, one that is both political (he is not sensitive to feminist concerns) and personal (he can be a pig).

Often, brocialism manifests at left-wing powwows. Someone raises a feminist grievance. The brocialist instructs her that she is distracted from the paramount issue, namely class. And the condescension is usually obvious. Sarah Jaffe, a prominent left-wing journalist, has been there. “Brocialists,” she explains, are “guys who are so enamored of their own radicalness or progressiveness or whateverness that they are convinced they can do no wrong.”

The word entered the discourse two years ago via an environmental-studies graduate student named Benjamin Silverman (“Of course a guy takes credit for the term,” says Jaffe) who felt that some in a heated left-wing Reddit thread were not sufficiently reckoning with Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s rape accusations—a stance they “justified,” says Silverman, “as being not as important as class.” The word owes a debt to the neologism “manarchist” and is a close cousin to “brogressive.” “Brocialist” and “brogressive” are both species of the very popular genus “portmanbro,” terms that incorporate “bro” to mock a certain dumb-jock swagger. Like most jokes, portmanbros began as larks—“brodown,” “bromance”—but can now be a bit more pointedly political.

The problem brocialism diagnoses is not new. “Misogyny within the left has historically inspired women’s rights movements,” feminist intellectual Susan Faludi told me. The nineteenth-century abolitionist movement marginalized women. Suffragism followed. Many dashing dudes of the 1960s New Left refused to cede the prerogatives they enjoyed over their female counterparts—who became second-wave feminist leaders. So, who knows what good today’s brocialists might provoke?

Seven states now mandate that women seeking abortion get an ultrasound first, and require doctors to offer the women a chance to see the images; three states require the doctors to show and describe the ultrasound. But despite the conservative push for these laws, smaller studies out of Texas, Canada and South Africa imply that sonogram viewings do not impact women’s decisions to end or continue their pregnancies.

This latest study is much larger. Researchers analyzed 15,575 medical records from an urban abortion care provider in Los Angeles. Each patient seeking an abortion was asked how she felt about her choice: Those who made “clear and confident” replies were rated as having “high decision certainty,” while those who seemed sad, angry or ambivalent were said to show “medium” or “low” decision certainty. (Only 7.4 percent of the women fell into the latter categories.) Patients underwent ultrasounds as part of the standard procedure, and 42.5 percent of them opted to see the images. Of those, 98.4 percent terminated their pregnancies; 99 percent of the women who did not look at the photographs ended their pregnancies. But here’s the thing: The women who viewed the sonograms and then backed out were all part of that 7.4 percent of women with low or medium decision certainty. Women who knew abortion was the right decision for them continued with the procedure whether they were shown the images or not.

The main takeaway here is definitely that 98.4 percent of the women who saw their ultrasounds went on to get an abortion anyway. And for the 1.6 percent who decided not to go through with it, other factors, such as gestational age, were more salient in swaying them. (“It is the information the ultrasound scan renders…rather than the image that influences women’s decision-making,” the researchers write.) Also, it is clear that once you’ve resolved to terminate, gazing at the bean won’t change that: Exactly none of the women with high decision certainty were dissuaded by their sonograms.

Yet viewing the ultrasound images did influence some of the wavering women to stick with their pregnancies. Even though the number is very small, this is important to acknowledge. It means not only that forcing or pressuring women to look at their fetus will probably prevent a sliver of abortions—which is relevant for those who oppose and want to reduce abortions—but also that some women do respond to these pictures. I don’t buy the patronizing notion that patients seeking abortion “know not what they do”—that they have some false idea about the contents of their uteruses to be toppled by an “adorable,” “precious” or “lifelike” sonogram. I also doubt all women even have the maternal instinct right-wingers hope these images will fan to life. But I do trust that unsure women who voluntarily look at ultrasounds and then decide against abortion are acting as rationally as the ones who decide to go through with it. We all make choices along a variety of axes: the financial axis, the relationship status axis, the personal goals and dreams axis, the ethical axis and, yes, the emotional axis. Expecting women to ignore any one scrap of data (as if they are not capable of weighing it, carefully, alongside the others) is underestimating women.

Natalia Cecire gives a roaring defense of the humanities - one to which I would love to see the usual suspects actually respond (not that they will). She observes:

The humanities are often represented as an irrelevant, moribund, and merely preservationist field, passing on old knowledge of old things without producing anything new. That's why it keeps having to be "defended" by people saying, "no! old shit matters too!"

The reality, however, is more complicated than that pictures suggests:-
Do you know a black child who grew up knowing about America’s great traditions in African American literature, visual art, music, and film? Are you glad Their Eyes Were Watching God and Cane are in print? Then thank the scholars, artists, and activists who have recovered that work—often obscured by a racist publishing culture and by an academy that didn’t think it was important at the time. There’s a reason that students protested and sat in to fight for the establishment of ethnic studies and women’s studies departments in the 1960s and 70s. It wasn’t a fashion statement: serious formal engagement with the cultural contributions of women and ethnic minorities was urgently needed. No one can credibly say in public that women cannot be great authors anymore, for example, and when the writer V.S. Naipaul tried in 2011 (and David Gilmour in 2013), everybody knew how ridiculously wrong he was. How did they know? Thank the humanities. Thank those horrible feminist critics from the '80s who allegedly ruined literary scholarship. They worked like hell to change the language, and most of them never got famous.

It is obvious, of course, that some cranky and usually male academics did everything they could to prevent the very positive cultural changes prompted by research, curiosity, and resistance in the humanities. But the point is that there are very few cultural changes that have transpired - ever - that don't fundamentally represent a collision between humanistic ways of knowing. While many, and often those working in the biological and psychological sciences, for instance, were proclaiming the fixity of human nature, humanists and lovers of the humanities demonstrated that human nature was either plastic or non-existent. And that's just one example for your Sunday reading.

I saw American Hustle on New Years Day. I was pleasantly surprised when comedian Louis C.K. popped onto the screen. In the film he plays the role of police chief Stoddard Thorsen who spars with an overzealous cop Richie DiMaso (played by Bradley Cooper).

This role comes just months after C.K. showed up in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine. Meanwhile, his critically acclaimed FX television show, Louie, is about to begin its fourth season.

Louis C.K.’s cultural capital is rising alongside a social movement that is also taking off right now: the domestic workers’ movement in the United States. Few would think to connect the comedian with an immigrant women-led movement focused on improving labor protections for workers who care for children, clean homes and serve as companions to elders. Most of these workers are women of color who toil in private homes, and whose labor for decades has barely earned them a minimum wage. The movement has secured a domestic workers’ bill of rights in three states — New York, Hawaii and California – as well as reversed longstanding Fair Labor Standards Act regulations that excluded home care workers from minimum wage and overtime pay.

While its policy objective is to improve wages and working conditions, at its root, the domestic workers’ movement seeks to transform how we value domestic labor. The movement sends the message that work that takes place inside the home is challenging, exhausting, high-stakes, and thus needs to be valued more in society generally.

Yet Yellen was never the president's first choice. The position had long been promised to Summers in exchange for his agreeing to serve during Obama's first term as economic adviser, rather than as Treasury secretary, the role he held in the Clinton administration. Throughout the summer, reports surfaced that Summers remained the president's leading choice for Fed chair, even though Yellen had attracted broad support and been endorsed by more than 450 economists across the political spectrum.

At first quietly, and then not so quietly, women went to work organizing opposition to Summers, based jointly on his failed economic track record and his history of sexist and insensitive remarks.

Ultraviolet and the National Organization for Women took the lead. While the grassroots groups gathered petitions, asked people to call Congress, and launched a public education campaign to highlight Yellen's abundant qualifications for Fed chair, a group of powerful female donors made personal calls to members of the Senate Banking Committee.

"It wasn't so much that we wanted a woman to head up the Fed," said Georgia Berner, a businesswoman and progressive donor who previously served on a regional Fed board. "It was that we did not believe that an intelligent, competent person should be discounted because of their gender."

"My daughter and I lay around eating Cheetos and ice cream in the middle of the day. My daughter scores very high in the MAP tests and is in advanced math at her school. My daughter has been raised with a mother, (was pretty once) that walked away from a very gross industry. If the size of your butt or how you look in a bikini equates womanhood? We as woman have missed the boat. A boat that my daughter will never miss".

Dear Mr. Basketmouth. I write in peace, because war does not solve anything. Moreover I am desperate to communicate in a way that will get you to understand the gravity of what you did by sharing a horrible joke, whose punchline is rape. Of African girls. Not a white girl which is stated very clearly at the beginning of your joke. By the way please do not accuse me of turning this into a racial matter. No, Actually you did that. Here is your joke sir:

White girls:

1st date: Coffee

2nd date: Kiss

3rd date: sex

African girls:

1st date: Fast food

2nd date: Hug

3rd date: Chinese restaurant

4th date: kiss

5th date: Attempted sex but failed

6th date: Shopping

7th date: Cinema, new phone, more shopping

8th date: Attempted sex but failed

9th date: RAPE!!

Oh and I took a screen shot of it in case you cannot believe that you would ever do such a thing. Here it is.

Would your joke be funny if your mother your sister, your aunt, your daughter had been raped? If you daughter or your sister had come home with blood running down her legs because some brute had seen her, not as a human being with feelings and a physical body that hurts and bleeds, but as a vessel for his lust, his rage, his disrespect and his misogyny?

Would your joke be funny to you if you came home to find your 6 month old daughter barely alive because 5 men had broken into your home and decided that a baby’s tiny vagina was big enough to contain their five penises one after the other, muffling her cries with her burp cloth until she passed out?

Would your joke be funny if your favorite uncle gave himself permission to pin down your 12 year old daughter as she gave him water to drink? How would you laugh when you came home and found her doubled over in pain with a haunted look in her eyes?

Perhaps you would guffaw at the news that your daughter committed suicide because she had been raped and could not deal with it. She had no one to tell because her father, comedian Basket mouth thought rape was a big JOKE? That he would laugh at her, and tell her she deserved it for having worn such a short skirt or having gone to dinner and allowed him to spend money on her? Mr. Basketmouth your 5,000 fans who loved your joke were making comments like: after all that she deserves to be raped. The few people who tried to be the voices of reason were insulted and heckled off your page, leaving an aggregation of the sickness that our men are. Yes those men who like your status are the sickness we have to contend with as African women. Those 5,000 odd fans of yours are part of the problem because their endorsement of your hideous attempt at humor is a signal that there is a fundamental hatred for African women by African men and that raping African women is fair game.