How are African feminist activists navigating the potential and the power dynamics of communication in the digital age? Jennifer Radloff surveys the field in her introduction to Feminist Africa’s latest edition, “e-spaces : e-politics”.

The advent and development of the internet have expanded the frontiers of feminist activism. Feminist Africa is itself a prime example of the audacious digital engagements of women’s movements all over the world. Established over 10 years ago with the support of Africa’s resurgent feminist community, Feminist Africa (FA) is the continent’s first open-access online scholarly journal, and still the only one dedicated to publishing and promoting independent feminist scholarship as an activist project.

Unless challenged, information and communication technology (ICT) access and reproduce not only gender inequalities but also historical, linguistic, geopolitical, economic, cultural, racial and other interconnected axes of privilege and power. As access and use of the internet mirror the sex/gender, class and other power dynamics offline, so do the violations. State control, censorship, surveillance, invasion of privacy, curtailment of freedom of expression and association, and violence against women are some of the issues that internet rights organisations are taking up, and which United Nations structures are also attempting to address.

Enter Feminist Africa’s latest edition on e-spaces : e-politics – offering perspectives on the implications of global digitisation that emerge out of feminist praxis across the continent; keeping pace with the rapid expansion of cyberfeminism by presenting the latest on African women’s ongoing and remarkable contribution to this global arena.

Historical evidence reveals that it was a woman – Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) – who wrote the first computer programme. Lovelace also originated the concept of using binary numbers, and was an early visionary – seeing the potential of the earliest computer models to develop far beyond simple number-crunching. Xide Xie (1921–2000), banished during the Cultural Revolution, was key to the development of solid-state physics in China. Rose Dieng-Kuntz (1956–2008), Senegalese scientist, was one of the first scholars to understand the important of the Web and to map how it would evolve to specialise in artificial intelligence and knowledge management.

"We have a very long history of effectively saying, 'If she's in prostitution, then what happens to her does not matter,'" said Kaethe Morris Hoffer, executive director of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation. "This conviction stands firmly against that proposition, and we applaud it."

The research shows that men who pay for sex often believe that they buy the right to do anything they want, Morris Hoffer said. Friday's verdict conveys that no one has that right, she said. She praised prosecutors, noting that having the state stand up for the woman sends a "profound and important message to the community at large."

"The other message that we would hope it sends loud and clear is that prosecutors can achieve convictions, even when the victim of the sexual assault is a woman who has been prostituted," Morris Hoffer said.

Women in prostitution have long faced a stigma when it comes to sexual assault, said Jody Raphael, a visiting law professor at DePaul University who has written about violence against women. Her latest book, "Rape is Rape," was published last year.

"Women in prostitution, because of what they do, are rarely believed," Raphael said. "They have told me they don't go to police with these kinds of complaints because they feel they will be abused and … are afraid to come forward and to make a complaint."

Lawmaker Regrets Asking Why Men Can't Rape If Women Can Get Abortions

Maine State Rep. Lawrence Lockman (R) this week walked back his past remarks comparing legal abortion to the idea of letting men rape women, according to the Morning Sentinel.

In 1995, when he was part of the Pro Life Education Association, Lockman wrote in a letter, "If a woman has [the right to an abortion], why shouldn't a man be free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman? At least the rapist's pursuit of sexual freedom doesn't [in most cases] result in anyone’s death."

He also said in a past press clipping that progressives were exacerbating the AIDS epidemic by telling "the public that the practice of sodomy is a legitimate alternative lifestyle, rather than a perverted and depraved crime against humanity."

This week, after progressive blogger Mike Tipping reported on the comments, and local Democrats called on him to resign, Lockman released a statement saying he regrets his remarks.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/maine-gop-lawmakers-regrets-comparing-abortion-rape

“The red-light district in the town of Forbesgunge does not actually have any red lights. Indeed, there is no electricity. The brothels are simply mud-walled family compounds along a dirt path, with thatch-roof shacks set aside for customers. Children play and scurry along the dirt paths, and a one-room shop on the corner sells cooking oil, rice, and bits of candy. Here, in the impoverished northern Indian state of Bihar, near the Nepalese border, there’s not much else available commercially—except sex.”

Excerpt From: Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn. “Half the Sky.” Alfred A. Knopf, 2009-09-08. iB

At 35 years old I’ve found my true calling.

It is so far from the traditions of my family that none of us could have have imagined it. My father was an engineer, my mother an administrator. I played with toy soldiers and models cars as a child, studied languages and literature in college, trained as attorney and even served as a judge.

Yet today, I create and perform in feminist porn.

I grew up in very comfortable circumstances in Mystic, Connecticut, with two loving parents of Northern European Protestant ancestry who graced me with a doting childhood. They taught me I could do anything I wanted as long as I was a good student, so I made academic excellence the focus of my early life. They also taught me to be true to myself, and never to bear ill-will or malice. For them, and ultimately for me, life was about having just intentions above all else

Other fascinating things happened. The more I allowed myself to express my true desires, the more they shifted and changed. Increasingly, my fantasies turned toward women. When I watched porn, all of it was straight. After 12 years of absence, woman returned to my fantasies and dreams, and then to my life

Straight porn is my current frontier. Unfortunately, most of what I’ve viewed of commercial porn promotes a male-centered vision of desire in which men are always erect and women are ever-ready to serve the needs of men. It is vision that has led to cartoonish portrayals of beauty, misogyny, and, in many cases, female exploitation.
Porn can accomplish greater psychological and social good if it becomes more “feminist.” Rather than focusing on men getting off, it can include the complete human sexual experience: intimacy, respect for difference and varying desire, respectful and loving interchange between the genders, and the mutual pursuit of pleasure; and especially, an account of female desires.

To this end I am now creating and performing in videos that I hope will revolutionize pornography.

An elderly woman in Minnesota is seeking punitive damages against a nursing home that placed her in a mental health facility and protected her attacker after she was raped.

According to court documents obtained by the Star Tribune, Edgewood Vista senior living facility forced the 89-year-old woman to spend 72 hours in the mental health unit of St. Luke’s Hospital near Duluth after she reported that 30-year-old Andrew Scott Merzwski had raped her in her bed at the senior home.

The woman said that Merzwski had entered her room as she preparing for bed. After she invited him to watch a movie, he started taking off his clothes.

“It’s not right, this wouldn’t be right,” the woman reportedly told Merzwski, pointing to a photo of her husband.

After the victim's daughter notified police, Merzwski admitted that he had sex with the 89-year-old woman.

About that same time, the nursing home transferred the woman to a psychiatric ward at St. Luke’s Hospital for nearly three days.

"The room she was in was dark and cold … and they locked her in at night and all she had was a blanket," nurse examiner Theresa Flesvig said in the court documents.

When Flesvig was finally able to examine the victim, she found the “biggest tear” as a result of rape that she had ever seen in her career.

I've been married to a nurse for more than a quarter of a century, and let me tell you, nurses are not what you expect (and I don't even care what you expect, because you are wrong)!

Let's begin by tearing down some of the more famous assumptions about nurses right off the top:

The Nurse as Sex Kitten:

Any man who lived through the early seventies or has made it a point to rent such famous videos as "Night Duty Nurses" or "Student Nurses" or "Night Duty Student Nurses" or any one of several dozen nurse-centric skin flicks will mmediately believe that all nurses have heaving bosoms, just millimeters away from popping out of skin tight white uniforms. You will also believe that nurses always wear white garters, fishnet hose, and stilettos. This, of course, is a handy dress code because movie nurses spend *a lot* of time hopping in and out of patient's beds.

The reality is that most nurses wear scrubs - Shapeless, draping hunks of cotton that could cause you to breeze past Pamela Anderson without a second look. Shoes are white and chunky with blobs of things on them better left Unexplored. Socks replace white hose and garters, and when is the last time Anyone saw a nursing cap? Graduation, perhaps?

The Nurse as an Angel:

If you want to hear the latest gross jokes, just find a nurse. Some uninformed males seem to think of nurses as angelic creatures: demure and loving, a cross between a nun and their mom. Well, hate to bust your bubble, guy, but as a group, nurses are some of the rawest folks you'll ever run into. I don't care how sweet and demure they may look on the outside; inside is someone who has seen things that would gag a maggot, break your heart, or Drive a normal person nuts. So most nurses develop a very wicked sense of humor squarely lodged in the black-to-sick side of the scale.

Also, in case you are looking for angelic sympathy for the little boo-boo you had in the shop, forget it! Let's say as a typical male klutz, you manage to saw your finger off. You go running to your nurse wife who is on the phone with a nurse friend of hers. As she continues to talk to her friend, she gives the stub a good eyeballing, slaps a towel on it, takes out a baggy to put the severed digit in, and tells you to get some ice while she is explaining to her friend that her dummy husband just sawed his finger off. As you stand there bleeding profusely for 15 minutes she calmly finishes her conversation as though nothing is going on until finally she says, "Well I guess I better get him to the hospital."She hangs up the phone, looks at you, sighs and calmly says, "Let's go."

You have just learned an important lesson. On the nurse scale of emergencies, yours is about a minus 9! As my wife has told me, "when you are on a ventilator, with six drips running, your head down and your feet up, then you're sick. Anything less than that isn't worth getting excited over!"

Minnesota Congressman Michele Bachmann has issued her edict on the chances Hillary Clinton's theoretical campaign would have during a theoretical 2016 election: not good. Mostly because America simply isn't ready for a female President. I bet the schmucks who donated to Bachmann's 2012 Presidential campaign feel pretty stupid now!

During an interview with columnist Cal Thomas, Bachmann admitted that she didn't think America was ready for Hillary Clinton because #BENGHAZI #OBAMACARE, but even if those things weren't #BENGHAZI huge #OBAMACARE black eyes on Hillary #BENGHAZI Clin#OBAMACAREton's record, she still wouldn't win. Why? Because America's not experiencing "woman guilt" like they experienced "white guilt." Not enough people want it hard enough. Seriously.

Bachmann says a lot of people "aren't ready" for a female president. "I think there was a cachet about having an African-American president because of guilt." (Presumably she means because of slavery and the lengthy denial of civil rights to blacks.) "People don't hold guilt for a woman," she says, adding that while people vote for women for virtually every other office "I don't think there is a pent-up desire" for a woman president.
Yes. Despite the fact that speculation on who will become the female President has been part of the political landscape throughout the last several decades, we don't want it hard enough. And then, just for good measure, Bachmann said something dumb about race. If she'd have thrown in something xenophobic about muslims, something wrong about abortion, and something hateful about gay people, we'd have won Bingo!

Bless your whackadoodle Minnesota face, Michele Bachmann. Bless it.