The white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was also a strong proponent of women’s rights. In 1853, he was at a women’s rights convention where a man complained that the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments unfairly impugned men’s character, and a woman conceded that both sexes were to blame for the situation. Garrison responded forcefully, in a way that I think is relevant to contemporary discussions relating to “privilege checking”:

Those who do wrong ignorantly, do not willingly continue in it, when they find they are in the wrong. Ignorance is not an evidence of guilt certainly. It is only an evidence of a want of light. They who are only ignorant, will never rage, and rave, and threaten, and foam, when the light comes; but being interested and walking in the light, will always present a manly front, and be willing to be taught and be willing to be told they are in the wrong.

Take the case of slavery: How has the anti-slavery cause been received? Not argumentatively, not by reason, not by entering the free arena of fair discussion and comparing notes; the arguments have been rotten eggs, and brickbats and calumny, and in the southern portion of the country, a spirit of murder, and threats to cut out the tongues of those who spoke against them. What has this indicated on the part of the nation? What but conscious guilt? Not ignorance, not that they had not the light. They had the light and rejected it.

How has this Woman’s Rights movement been treated in this country, on the right hand and on the left? This nation ridicules and derides this movement, and spits upon it, as fit only to be cast out and trampled underfoot. This is not ignorance. They all know the truth. It is the natural outbreak of tyrrany. It is because the tyrants and usurpers are alarmed. They have been and are called to judgment, and they dread the examination and exposure of their position and character.

Quoted from Schneir, Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, pp. 88-89.

http://itself.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/william-lloyd-garrison-on-privilege-checking/

Michael Angelo stands in the Wonderland Beauty Parlor, a swarm of mermaid Barbies hanging overhead. Angelo, who owns the quirky Manhattan salon catering to fashion-y clients such as Brooklyn Decker and Lydia Hearst, has just returned from another salon — a simpler place on a dusty city street in Cambodia. There, he helps teach former sex slaves the art of hairdressing.

The young women, escapees from brothels in a country rife with human trafficking, are learning to support themselves in life outside the sex trade. Kidnapped or tricked into slavery as children, they were rescued with the help of another survivor, Somaly Mam, who runs shelters and job-training programs around the country.

Angelo arrived at the salon, located on a busy intersection in Phnom Penh, in late April with a colleague, Annastasia Konidaris, and armfuls of hairdryers and curling irons. "Some of the girls had never held a pair of scissors," he says. "It was like I was Santa Claus." He had first heard about the young survivors in 2006 through a client at his own salon, Czech model Veronica Varekova, who had seen Mam speak at an event and couldn't wrap her head around the idea of children being sold for sex. Angelo "went home and Googled," he says, and saw a photo of a girl in a brothel that "haunted" him. Her eyes were hollow, her lips red. "I always thought women wore lipstick because they love it — that's the culture we grew up in."

Slavery is big business globally, not just in Cambodia. An estimated 27 million people are current victims worldwide, according to the U.S. State Department. In Cambodia, a desperately poor country still reeling from the genocide of the Khmer Rouge, toddlers can be sold into the sex trade. Virgins command a high price — as much as $4,000, according to the State Department's 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report. Local men as well as foreigners serve as clients, with the locals often driven by myths that sex with a virgin brings luck or health.

These women’s bodies are subversive bodies. Women’s power deployed in this way can only be oppositional, always a challenge, always-already embodying and performing the power to refuse. Yet, women’s bodies do not have to be unclothed for significant utterance. A woman’s daily clothing is already a mode of speech about her life and about her relationship to the situation of her embodiment. In contemporary Kenya, even the banality of women’s everyday clothing appears to pose a threat to masculinist domination.

The Kenyan post-colonial social contract is not a political agreement between allegedly neutral individual citizens but a patriarchal and ethnicist order based on the domination of all Kenyan women by all Kenyan men. The seemingly unsayable political problem in Kenya is the post-colonial dominance of the patriarchal ethnic Gikuyu elites, whilst the ethnic virulence of Kenya’s patriarchal politics threatens our constitutional democratic opening. The bodies of women speaking from different horizons of political possibility create generative conditions of dissent and democratic renewal. It is very much to my purpose to pay homage to the lineage of Gikuyu women’s political protest, in which I include the historical acts of Muthoni Nyanjiru and Wangari Maathai and of contemporary women who continue to use their bodies powerfully.

In 2008 Kenya’s Post-Election Violence, Rachel Kungu, protected only by her commitment to the work of social repair, walked up to barricades of burning tires erected by angry, armed, and violent young men, to negotiate for peace. In May 2013, Muthoni Njogu wrote a poem the day after she participated in a demonstration outside Kenya’s Parliament:


yesterday, i was hit.
yesterday, my heart, hurt.

[…]
right now.
there is a swelling at the back of my right leg,
beneath the ankle,
i cannot sleep.

[…]

nothing prepares one to be on the receiving end
of a riot police baton.

nothing prepares one to sludge through itchy
eyes, coughing phlegm
& seemingly random state of confusion hours
after the violent dispersion.

nothing prepares for the experience of running
solo
while a band of armed, club welding, tear canister
holding men run after you shouting for you to
stop.


I oppose the exclusionary and false Gikuyu-centric narrative and the ideological erasure of the many other ethnic communities in the Kenyan story as told by Gikuyu men. Here, I also want to insist on the strong tradition within Gikuyu women’s culture of resisting tyranny, oppression, domination, and hubristic upumbafuness by the men. The multi-generational trajectory of Gikuyu women’s political embodiment and ethical public action contradicts the version of Gikuyu culture enforced by misogynist male interpreters and patriarchal narratives.

Beatriz, a critically ill Salvadorian woman who was denied a therapeutic abortion by the country’s Supreme Court last week, underwent a cesarean on Monday and is currently recovering and in stable condition; her anencephalic fetus, lacking parts of its brain and skull, did not survive.

“She’s in good hands, being looked after well,” Health Minister Maria Isabel Rodríguez told Reuters on Monday. “I expect things to go well over the next few hours.”

After debating Beatriz’s petition for a therapeutic abortion — a request supported by her doctors, the Salvadoran health ministry and international human rights groups — for seven weeks, the court ruled against the procedure, but determined that doctors “could proceed with interventions” if Beatriz’s health continued to deteriorate due to her kidney failure and lupus.

Soon after the ruling, the health ministry ordered Beatriz’s doctors to perform a cesarean, a legal compromise allowing the state to uphold its restriction on all abortion while enabling doctors to terminate Beatriz’s nonviable pregnancy and, ultimately, save her life.

“At this point, the interruption of the pregnancy is no longer an abortion. It is an induced birth,” Rodríguez, said of the cesarean on Thursday.

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/04/el_salvadors_beatriz_in_recovery_after_cesarean/

Series: Guardian StudentsPrevious | Next | Index
New shoots of student feminism – your best pictures
Frustrated by sexism and misogyny on campus, increasing numbers of students are setting up feminist groups at their universities. These striking photos, submitted by Guardian readers from universities around the country, document the rise of student feminism in the UK

RHRC: So is this any different from young women’s activism against sexual oppression? Are there differences in approaches or issues that we should be aware of as we work to build a more inclusive movement for reproductive justice?

KJ: Reproductive justice isn’t just a women’s issue; it’s a people issue. And organizing and advocacy is about meeting people where they are. To do that, you cannot make any part of a person’s identity invisible. You have to be willing to see them, hear them. Even when it is hard and painful, and especially when you disagree or when you are uncomfortable.

Organizing with men is no different.

But that doesn’t mean that male-identified folks joining the Bro-Choice campaign will always find this advocacy easy. Examining gender roles in pursuit of reproductive justice challenges ideas so deeply ingrained in our culture that they are invisible to most. Those who choose to do so may find that they need to step back and listen at times. It won’t always be comfortable, but that’s really true of all social justice work when it’s done right.

Women have been the champions of issues that affect both men and women for decades: sex education, family leave policies, sexual assault, and more. Women are uniquely impacted by these issues, and they should continue to be advocates. It will always be appropriate and necessary for women to be visible and vocal leaders in this work. Women will always need to be true mentors and guides of new activists and leaders entering into this work. But we hope Bro-Choice will offer a new point of entry that gives men the green light to engage more actively with us in the fight for justice for all.

Dartmouth College. (Wikimedia Commons/CC, 2.0)

Dartmouth College students who filed a federal complaint against the school for failing to report sexual assaults are themselves being charged by the school with violating the student code of conduct. Their crime: “failing to follow college officials’ instructions” about participating at a protest at a campus event on April 19, where they marched through a meeting where prospective students were encouraged to come to Dartmouth.

“We were protesting sexual assault on this campus, and the administration’s failure to respond to homophobia and racism on campus,” Nastassja Schmiedt, a Dartmouth sophomore, told The Huffington Post. “We were informally informing the college of civil rights violations.”

At least ten students who joined the April 19 demonstration received letters from the director of the Undergraduate Judicial Affairs Office informing them of the disciplinary proceedings. Most of the students, Dartmouth senior Lea Roth told The Huffington Post’s Tyler Kingkade, had been part of formal complaint filed against Dartmouth last week under the federal Cleary Act, stating that the school failed to prosecute and report sexual violence on campus. The Cleary Act requires public disclosure of campus crime.

At the recruiting event, attended by several hundred prospective students, fifteen members of a student group called Real Talk Dartmouth marched through the room. They chanted “Dartmouth has a problem!” according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, and described incidents of homophobia, racism and sexual assault. One carried a sign that read “I was called a fag in my freshman dorm.” Administrators had attempted to prevent the students from entering the room where the meeting was being held—that’s the basis of the charge of “failing to follow college officials’ instructions.”



Read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/174609/dartmouth-students-who-protested-rape-are-charged-violating-school-rules#ixzz2VCZsTUMM

This article titled “Meet the new wave of activists making feminism thrive in a digital age” was written by Tracy McVeigh, for The Observer on Saturday 1st June 2013 18.34 UTC

It was a remarkable victory when the social networking giant Facebook caved in to pressure last week and promised to “do better” to tackle anti-women hate pages on its site. A campaign by three women succeeded where many previous efforts had failed, forcing Facebook to take action over content celebrating rape and domestic violence.

It took just a week for the campaigners to rouse hundreds of thousands of supporters, thanks to a growing digital network of women who are part of the “great feminist revival”. Spare Rib magazine is soon to relaunch, women’s groups are enjoying a growth in interest, and online feminism is flourishing in blogs and tweets. Beyoncé and Madonna were in London for the Chime for Change concert, promoting global empowerment for women and girls.

The Facebook/Feminist Plot to Destroy Free Speech, Male Liberty, and 10-13% of A Voice for Men’s Traffic


Men’s Rights, er, activists are waving their arms frantically in the air over what they see as a dire new threat to men and manhood: Facebook’s recent annoucement that it was going to try to do a better job of taking down violent images mocking victims of rape and domestic violence, and other kinds of misogynistic hate speech.


Last week, as many of you no doubt already know, a coalition of feminist groups launched a campaign targeting Facebook and its advertisers for tolerating this sort of content on Facebook — in many cases even after it was reported to Facebook moderators as clearly violating the site’s already existing policies against hate speech and graphic violence. (For many truly disgusting and possibly TRIGGERING examples, see here.)

Well, Facebook actually listened, and announced it would be making efforts to better handle “gender-based” hate speech, and would be “solicit[ing] feedback from legal experts and others, including representatives of the women’s coalition and other groups that have historically faced discrimination” — among them some of the groups involved in the protest. While Facebook’s promises remain vague, those behind the protest are hailing this, correctly I think, as a victory.
-----------------------------

In a posting he declared “probably the most important article I have ever written” — not that this is saying much — Elam attempted to rally the troops to fight against what he called “the greatest challenge the M(H)RM has faced so far.” Elam claimed that taking down images of brutalized women with captions like “women deserve equal rights — and lefts” isn’t the real goal here. No, he charged,

"feminist ideologues are co-opting Facebook, and they will root out any and all opposition to their worldview."



http://manboobz.com/2013/05/31/the-facebookfeminist-plot-to-destroy-free-speech-male-liberty-and-10-13-of-a-voice-for-mens-traffic/

Anbara Salam Khalidi’s Memoirs of an Early Arab Feminist was published in Arabic in 1978, and tell a life story which spans Ottoman, British and Israeli colonialism. Finally available in English — translated by Anbara’s son Tarif — this slender autobiography challenges many stereotypes about the place of women in Arab society, as well as being a reminder of the artificial and cruel ways in which the modern Levant is fragmented.

Anbara Salam was born in Beirut in 1897, one of 12 children of an affluent Muslim merchant. Her family was deeply religious and valued education; her mother came from a family of scholars and, when not managing the family home, read Arabic history, religious books and literature.

Two of Anbara’s brothers served as ministers in various Lebanese governments, and one as prime minister. Of her sisters, the youngest, Rasha, devoted much of her life to the Palestinian struggle.

One fascinating aspect of this book is that, although Anbara Salam lived until 1986, her life spanned some of the most intensive social and technological change seen by humanity. Her memoirs include, for example, detailed descriptions of Lebanese Muslim wedding traditions which, in the 1970s, she set out in detail so that young Lebanese could learn about practices which had almost died out.