Mount Holyoke student Ali Safran said she came up with the idea for the Tumblr in October 2012, the three-year anniversary of her own assault. She said the name is a play on the phrase “strength in numbers.”

“The blog has grown to be about removing stigma and shame from sharing your story as a survivor, and is also a place for survivors to read others’ stories and be able to have their own experience validated,” the 21-year-old Safran said.


She added, “A lot of people have written to me to say how thankful they are to have a space to share; that they’d never told anyone about being assaulted before, or had told people and had gotten really hurtful or blaming reactions.”


She added, “A lot of people have written to me to say how thankful they are to have a space to share; that they’d never told anyone about being assaulted before, or had told people and had gotten really hurtful or blaming reactions.”

A Texas school district is apparently teaching sexual education in the worst way possible: by trying to shame students into staying virgins until marriage.

Sexual health advocate Katie Gustainis Vela recently obtained what appears to be an instructional worksheet meant for teachers who lecture on sex ed. Vela tweeted a photo of the worksheet -- which likens people who have premarital sex to pieces of chewed gum or used toothbrushes -- and indicated that it is used in the Canyon Independent School District. (According to ThinkProgress, Vela currently lives in Boston but used to reside in Canyon.)

It’s not perfect. It’s not a solution to all problems women face in society. It’s a 15 minute talk where he offers the, admittedly not novel idea, that being feminist shouldn’t be an extreme position. We shouldn’t have a spectrum where sexism and feminism exist as uncomfortable extremes with an acceptable gray area between them. You shouldn’t have to be or not be a “feminist”. That feminism should be the default stance. There should be no gray area.

It’s a nuanced discussion that obviously can’t be handled by a single white man standing in front of a room full of people who paid lots of money to hear him speak for 15 minutes, but it’s a discussion worth having for sure. The language we use when discussing things shapes the way we think about those things. I don’t think “genderist” is going to give the same punch as “sexist” or “racist” and I find a lot of neologisms to feel forced, pretentions and a bit academic. But it is a problem that the word we have for caring about women’s equality is one people don’t wish to identify with. And those problems come from within and without the feminist community itself.

I hate all the reasons that someone might say “I am not a feminist but [insert feminist value.]” And that it’s wielded in the same way someone might say “I am not a racist but [insert racist value.]” And everyone nods and understands. You’re not one of THOSE people, see… but you can see why some people might say and think things that THOSE people would.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation’s Traveler Information Management System regularly sends traffic alerts through email and Twitter about any accidents or road work that may impact commuters. This week, the system sent an alert warning drivers that an accident had closed an exit ramp near Raleigh, but rather than leave it at that, the notice went on to blame the incident on “women drivers, rain, Obamacare.”

“Stay home,” the notice concluded.

And no, the system wasn’t hacked. The alert was sent out by a DOT employee who thinks petty sexism is hilarious.

“We did not get hacked,” DOT spokesman Mike Charbonneau told the News & Observer. “After an investigation this afternoon we learned that an [information technology] contractor who was hired six months ago was performing routine tests on the TIMS feed. And that individual violated procedures by failing to turn off the external feed while testing, and for the inappropriate message content.

“That individual was let go immediately,” he added.

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/08/north_carolina_traffic_alert_blames_accident_on_women_drivers_rain_obamacare/

One of America’s foremost problems is that old racist white men are still a very powerful and entrenched force, and as they get older, they are only getting madder and more racist. They do not seem to have much of a desire to simply go away on their own. In some cases, as distasteful as it will be, we will have to give them an incentive. Today, I will examine two of those cases, and try to determine what it will take to get rid of Richard Cohen and Ray Kelly.

There is a sort of general internet consensus, I think, that The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates is the best. He is the most thoughtful, the most incisive, the most honest, the rightest commentator we have. The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen is the opposite of Ta-Nehisi Coates. When the Eternal Gamer was deciding on the Madden player ratings for American current events columnists, he gave Cohen zeroes for insight and maxed him out on laziness and incuriosity. That is why it was a bit alarming, but not particularly surprising, to see Cohen write this, this week: (Emphasis mine.)

I sometimes think I have spent years unlearning what I learned earlier in my life. For instance, it was not George A. Custer who was attacked at the Little Bighorn. It was Custer — in a bad career move — who attacked the Indians. Much more important, slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks. Slavery was a lifetime’s condemnation to an often violent hell in which people were deprived of life, liberty and, too often, their own children. Happiness could not be pursued after that.

Yes, Richard Cohen, a journalist and columnist for nearly half a century, a college-educated, award-winning commentator, thought slavery was not such a bad thing until he saw a movie about it in 2013. Richard Cohen admits, in a major American newspaper, that until this month, he believed an archaic, widely discredited “Lost Cause” white supremacist myth. And in his nearly 70 years of literacy, he has not seen or heard or read anything to challenge that myth until he saw a Hollywood film on the subject. This is ignorance on a staggering scale. That paragraph should only preface a retirement announcement. “I am a deeply ignorant and cloistered old man,” should be the next sentence, “and no one should pay me for my views and opinions, because they are worthless.”

Earlier this year, Texas Republicans forced the nation’s most restrictive anti-abortion legislation into law. For years, Texas has been the epicenter of the GOP’s war on women and the war against reproductive rights. Because of that, women across the nation are rejecting Republicans at the ballot in record numbers. It is already well known that female Democrats in Texas strongly oppose the legislating of women’s bodies. After all, Wendy Davis is now campaigning to be the state’s next governor. But do female Republicans approve of the anti-women stance of their male colleagues? One top woman within the Texas GOP says no.

The highest ranking elected female Texas Republican, Susan Combs, blasted the GOP for its effort to legislate women’s bodies.
Susan Combs is the highest ranking elected female Republican at the state level in Texas. She currently holds the position of Comptroller. You would think that as a Republican she just goes along with what the male hierarchy of the GOP says and does. But that is hardly the case at all. As it turns out, Combs is not happy with how her party has treated women at all.

In an interview with the Washington Times, Susan Combs blasted Texas Republicans for alienating women across the state and slammed the GOP for being obsessed with regulating lady parts.

On Tuesday night, as Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe eked out a win over Republican Ken Cuccinelli in the Virginia gubernatorial race, both the media and reproductive rights organizations heralded his victory as a win for and by women. Exit polls revealed that while 45 percent percent percent of men voted for McAuliffe, 51 percent percent percent of women did, revealing a gender gap of six percentage points. But if we dig deeper, we begin to see a recurring trend within that gender gap and the gender gap of recent presidential elections: it is women of color, particularly black women, who help drive it.

The gender gap in voting patterns is nothing new. It first emerged in 1980, when it was revealed that Ronald Reagan had won the presidency with more votes from men than women. In fact, the Center for American Women in Politics shows that a gender gap has been present in every single election since the presidential election of 1980. Overall, women tend to vote more Democratic, and men tend to vote more Republican. Hence, the gender gap.

Yet, as we all too well know, women are not a monolith, and their voting patterns reflect that.

Women are not quite the cohesive voting bloc that political scientists have seen with African-Americans, Hispanics/Latinos or members of the LGBTQ community. Pundits, pollsters and politicians alike often opine about which way the "women's vote" will go in any given election, rhetorically framing women as a cohesive voting bloc despite evidence to the contrary. Because women are such a large group and constitute the majority of the American electorate, they continue to garner significant media coverage and political speculation. Additionally, the gender gap is not nearly as pronounced as the partisan divide between white voters and black and Latino voters.

In post-election cycles, the gender gap can become yet another way to reinforce the mythical narrative of the monolithic women's vote.

Much has been made about the gender gap in both of President Obama's elections. In 2008, the gender gap was 7 percentage points, despite the presence of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential nominee on the Republican ticket. The gender gap then notably increased in 2012, to 10 percentage points in favor of President Barack Obama over Republican nominee Mitt Romney in what was heralded as a women-dominated election. Fifty-five percent of women voting for Obama compared with only 45 percent percent of men. President Obama's re-election was largely credited to women voters who overcame his deficits among men.

Thrice-divorced, pill-abusing "conservative" Rush Limbaugh has a real problem with the loose morals of American women, whom he claims have been turned into "abortion machines" by Democratic politicians.

Limbaugh, who once called Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke a "slut" because she expressed the belief that insurance companies should be compelled to cover birth control, has his gullet in a bunch over the way he feels that women have been "demeaned" by liberal policies. Yesterday, he said,

Look at what [liberals] are doing to women with their policies: They're demeaning them, they're turning them into nothing but abortion machines. There's so much that we could be doing to just fight back, but the Republican Party, even if they had all the money in the world right now, doesn't seem inclined to do any of this.
Another cool way that Rush Limbaugh has defended women against being "demeaned": That time he suggested that abortion rates would decrease if women had to use guns to perform them.