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ismnotwasm

ismnotwasm's Journal
ismnotwasm's Journal
June 30, 2014

Fuck Hobby Lobby

They won. Disgusting freaks

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a limited decision, ruled Monday that closely held, for-profit companies can claim a religious exemption to the Obamacare requirement that they provide health insurance coverage for contraceptives.

For-profit corporations — including Conestoga Wood of Pennsylvania, owned by a family of Mennonite Christians, and Hobby Lobby, a family-owned chain of arts and crafts stores founded on Biblical principles — had challenged a provision of the Affordable Care Act.



http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hobby-lobby-ruling-employers-dont-have-cover-birth-control-n144321


We need a way to protest. I'm talking to co workers right now, but most don't even know what hobby lobby is
June 28, 2014

Inside the first International Conference on Men's Issues.

There were no protestors outside the modest lakefront veteran’s lodge in St. Clair Shores, just outside Detroit, Michigan. The very official-sounding First International Conference On Men’s Issues was relocated here from a downtown hotel, because of what the organizers alleged were “death threats,” but was later reported by local media to be space limitations. By the time yesterday’s planned 3pm “press conference” got going 25 minutes late, there were only about 30 people in the audience, most (but not all) white middle-aged men. A handful of them were reporters. The rest were true believers in a “War on Men.” There was a disco ball in the center of the hall, draped with white paper streamers.

“Point the camera that way and that way only,” said one of the three security guards armed with superfluous walkie talkies, reprimanding someone taking video footage of the attendees, which was prohibited. The organizers introduced the speakers at great lengths, taking pride in their various appearances on Fox News. A Voice For Men founder and conference organizer Paul Elam stated that the cop cars parked outside were there because of more death threats. ”I’m getting tired of the death threats,” shouted a staff member.

Outside, I spoke to St. Clair Shores Officer David Burmeister about the alleged death threats. He said that no specific threats have been made at all. The cops were contracted to be there by A Voice For Men. It appeared that they weren’t there to protect them from specific and imminent danger, but to give the illusion of it.


Below are direct quotes from the panelists — six females, five males fervently engaged in ”the war for men’s human rights” against an “Evil Empire” of “highly-organized radical feminists” hellbent on “feminizing” every facet of law. They include repeated mentions of urgent “misandry” issues such as allegedly widespread false paternity allegations and unflattering male buffoon characters on television sitcoms.


http://www.animalnewyork.com/2014/inside-first-international-conference-mens-issues/


The quotes are interesting and often deluded, and there are a few I agree with, but overall (for no real reason) this reminded me of 'The Cereal Killers' part of the story arc "The Dolls House" in the graphic novel Sandman by Neil Gaiman. (The 'Cereal Killers' are actually serial killers having their own convention)

The homophobic word 'feminized' is used repeatedly. What's extremely sad, is this small group of I'm assuming, miserable men, and their women supporters have created a paradigm that's unnessisary. The legitimate issues could have found common ground with and allied with feminism instead of setting up their straw man in an attempt to create legitimacy as a movement.

June 28, 2014

#YesAllWomen, Except Sex Workers

So, to why I posted this. You ever notice that most discussions of sex workers are women sex workers? Now, I'm a supporter of the Nordic model, but sometimes I think like this, if I lived in a world where women weren't threatened with violence and called skanks, hoes, whores, sluts, C*****, the new and lovely word "Thots" or just plain b*****, just for speaking their mind about, oh say what's on currency, or disagree with a popular opinion, or dare to deconstruct video games; a world where sex is revered and celebrated instead of turning into it a 'dirty' (women were and are considered unclean now and throughout millennia for various reasons) joke.

Where sex workers were not at risk of violence without, and often with, protection, a world with full reproductive autonomy, a world where "trafficking" means something you do with your car, a world where 12 year old girls are not already being taught how to "avoid" rape, a world that considers women to be just as 'sexual' as men, and that fact is celebrated in a respectful manner, it could, possibly probably create a market for more more male "whores"-- in other words, for sex work to be legit, it has to be equal. Gay, Trans, straight, Bi--and all genders represented equally. For sex work to be truly raised up, it can't be on the lives of women.

(while I'm on a rant--a world without Todd Akins, for one)

But we don't have that do we? We have women and no few men catering to skulking men cruising, and the occasional high priced male 'escort' falling into pre-packaged economic patterns. A few do very well, most do not--or at least not for long.

Do I think a sex worker can be a feminist? Hell yes. But 'sex workers' have their own blinds spots-- big ones--it's not just everyone else. Really.

What I want for sex workers is safety. Legalization doesn't provide that, but tossing women in jail for bowing to entitled demand isn't safe either. And no I don't have the perfect answer.

Now while this article cheery picks it's interviews, it's easy to find the horror stories because there are so very, very many of them. Comparing feminists objections to pornography and prostitution to anti-abortion assholes is disingenuous at best, mostly it's self-serving bullshit. (BTW--check back with me in about ten years-- less depending what you're involved in-- tell me how great it is. My friends ended up in rehab, (usually multiple times) married to assholes, divorced said assholes, in prison or dead. Or they got out of the life entirely)



“Whore-phobia”
Despite its long existence around the globe as a profession, sex work has been a controversial topic for many women and feminist groups, who often come to the conclusion that sex workers are far from being feminists because they choose to sell themselves and perpetuate the stereotype that women exist to please men.

As porn model and performer Minnie Scarlet explained to RH Reality Check last year, most of these feminists who contribute to the “slut-shaming” and “whore-phobia” in our culture are “white scholar-types” who fail to notice the class and racial issues associated with feminism, and fail to accept that some sex workers do their work for empowerment, liberation or fun.

The idea that sex workers can’t be feminists because of the nature of their work has been a point of contention for feminists and sex workers, like Molly, a sex worker in the United Kingdom, who argues that feminists need to recognize she is selling a service, not herself.

“There is nothing more misogynist than implying/stating that I’m selling ‘myself’ when I sell sex,” Molly said. “I am a lot more than my vagina and what I do in bed, and I expect feminists to understand that.”

Violet Rose, another sex worker from the U.K., pointed out that just because she has sex for money does not mean her vagina is penetrated by penises all day, every day.

“Lots of my clients want to chat, do some other sex acts, or do something else entirely,” she said. Since Rose says the demand for sex work isn’t going to end anytime soon, she and other sex workers deserve labor, human, and civil rights protections at work.

Siouxsie Q, a sex worker in San Francisco, agrees that many feminists groups have an apparent disregard for sex workers and do not typically tolerate prostitution — even when it’s legal. In a column for SF Weekly early this month, she argued that anti-porn and anti-sex work feminist groups are dictating choices women can make about their own bodies in a manner similar to anti-abortion groups.


http://www.mintpressnews.com/yesallwomen-except-sex-workers/193092/
June 28, 2014

Todd Akin Is Back and Bringing "Legitimate Rape" With Him

Same old shit, and sound way too familiar

And this sick asshole can go join the ranks of AVFM.


Todd Akin, displaying the phoenix-like powers of similar reactionaries Sarah Palin and Paula Deen, is back in the press again. He's got a new book out, Firing Back: Taking on the Party Bosses and Media Elite to Protect Our Faith and Freedom, and the Daily Mail reports that the book has Akin doubling down on his claim that women routinely lie about rape to cover up their sexy ways.

"When a woman claims to have been raped, the police determine if the evidence supports the legal definition of 'rape,'" Akin writes. "Is it a legitimate claim of rape or an excuse to avoid an unwanted pregnancy? Are the police warranted to take action against a crime or not?"
"In short, the word 'legitimate' modifies the claim and not the action. There have been women who have lied about being raped, as Norma McCorvey did before the U.S. Supreme Court. The infamous Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 was based on a lie."
"My comment about a woman's body shutting the pregnancy down," Akin adds in the book, "was directed to the impact of stress on fertilization. This is something fertility doctors debate and discuss. Doubt me? Google 'stress and fertilization,' and you will find a library of research on the subject."
Advertisement


Despite the airtight logic that Google results equal the truth, it's hard to accept Akin's framing of his earlier "legitimate rape" comment. Akin seems to think his critics were confused about what he meant when he said, "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down," but rest assured, they understood quite well that he was referring to the widespread myth that women routinely make up sexual assault to cover up for the sin of consensual sex. (In reality, false rape reports are rare, and women falsely accusing men they consented to have sex with after the fact is especially rare.)


http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/06/27/todd_akin_is_firing_back_still_talking_about_legitimate_rape_in_his_new.html
June 25, 2014

More Women Starting Businesses Isn’t Necessarily Good News

Quite honestly, I don't know what to make of this article. Are they talking about a brain drain, loss of talent or if women go their own way control is lost? There's a sour grapes feel to it as well. I'd appreciate opinions. Ironic that the woman writing it started her own business.

MORRA AARONS-MELE
Morra Aarons-Mele is the founder of Women Online and The Mission List. She is an Internet marketer who has been working with women online since 1999. She helped Hillary Clinton log on for her first Internet chat, and launched Wal-Mart’s first blog. Morra tweets at @morraam.

New data show women starting new businesses at a “torrid” pace, according to an American Express analysis of Census Bureau figures. Between 1997 and 2014, the number of women-owned businesses in the U.S. rose by 68 percent. They are starting an estimated 1,288 companies each day, up from 602 in 2011-12. They are starting businesses twice as fast as men.

Why are women starting businesses so fast? Women self-report that they often start businesses often to seize control of their time and schedule at work. And I understand the pull of leaving a strict corporate job for your own venture; I started my business in direct defiance of working for someone else.

Greater rates of small business creation seem like a good thing, but the economic impact of most women’s small businesses may not be what’s best for women, their families or the economy in the long run. As Alicia Robb from the Kauffman Foundation notes, “Less than 2 percent of women-owned firms reach that [million dollar] revenue threshold, and that is the same exact percentage as a decade ago.”Women-owned businesses are disproportionately in industries where the median receipts are less than $225,000 (and businesses with receipts less than $100,000 are more likely to fail). Most women struggle to replace their corporate salary, and 88% of women owned businesses are sole proprietorship, non-employer firms.

If women face lower upside in starting businesses, why do they do it? Perhaps because the fire of entrepreneurship is still preferable to the frying pan of established corporations.

Yes, women are graduating from college in higher numbers than men and permeating the workforce — at least at the entry and middle management levels. The women who make it to leadership roles perform better than their male peers, by several metrics. More women are C-suite executives than at any time in our nation’s history.


http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/06/more-women-starting-businesses-isnt-necessarily-good-news/
June 23, 2014

The rise of the 'slut' is a lie. The only requirement, it seems, is being female

Oh, but this is a good read


Sandra Fluke heard it when she talked about insurance coverage for birth control. Sara Brown from Boston told me she was first called it at a pool party in the fifth grade because she was wearing a bikini. Courtney Caldwell in Dallas said she was tagged with it after being sexually assaulted as a freshman in high school.

Many women I asked even said that it was not having sex that inspired a young man to start rumors that they were one.

And this is what is so confounding about the word "slut": it's arguably the most ubiquitous slur used against women, and yet it's nearly impossible to define.

The one thing we do know about "slut" is that it's the last thing a woman should want to be. Society is so concerned over women and girls' potential for promiscuity that we create dress codes, school curricula, even legislation around protecting women's supposed purity. Conservative columnists opine that women having sex is tantamount to a "mental health crisis", and magazine stories wonder if we're raising a generation of "prosti-tots".

Leora Tanenbaum, the author of SLUT! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation, told me that "a 'slut' is a girl or woman who deviates from norms of femininity. The 'slut' is not necessarily sexually active – she just doesn't follow the gender script."

This nebulous, unquantifiable quality of the slur is what makes it so distressing – there's no way to disprove something that has no conclusive boundaries to begin with. And because it's meant to be more of an identity than a label, it's a term not easily shaken off. "Slut" sticks to a person in a way that "asshole" never will.


http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/23/slut-female-word-women-being-female
June 22, 2014

Japanese Parliament to Women: Breed, don't lead

Japan is up in arms about insensitive and sexist remarks made by male members of The Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly (the equivalent of a U.S. State Government Assembly) toward a female representative during her presentation earlier this week. She was speaking on issues of raising children in Japan.


Ayaka Shiomura, a 36-year-old member of the opposition Your Party, called for the Tokyo metropolitan government to support women who need assistance while pregnant or raising children during a June 18 assembly session. She also suggested that the government should help Japanese women who have fertility issues to conceive children.

Japan is wrestling with a declining birth rate and growing elderly population. It has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world.

While she was speaking, men in the section for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) began jeering at her with lines like: “Hey you, should hurry up and get married!” and “Can’t you have babies?”

Shiomura continued to speak even though she had to choke back tears at one point. After the session, Minoru Morozumi, the secretary-general of Your Party’s assembly members, lodged a protest with his LDP counterpart, Osamu Yoshiwara.

Osamu Yoshiwara told the press that he wasn’t in a position to confirm whether or not it was a member of his party who yelled out the comments, but he asked assembly members to behave in a “in a dignified manner.”


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/22/japanese-parliament-to-women-breed-don-t-lead.html
June 21, 2014

Here’s What ‘10,000 People’  At NOM’s Anti-Gay Hate March Really Looks Like



The National Organization For Marriage is claiming that 10,000 people attended their anti-gay hate march in Washington, D.C. yesterday. By every account, including news reporters on the ground who attended the march, the resounding number of attendees was repeatedly place at about 2000. But NOM is claiming victory in their fight against love.

“With gay marriage continuing to gain momentum and acceptance in the nation’s culture,” Emily Scheie and Rikki Elizabeth Stinnette at World Magazine write, “Joe Grabowski, director of communications for the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), said standing for the biblical definition of marriage ‘can feel like a very lonely position.’ NOM organized the march to bring people together. Last year, roughly 7,000 attended. This year, organizers estimated as many as 10,000 joined the procession.”

Apparently, “roughly” means “far less than,” and “estimated” just means “are lying if they claim.”


LOOK: How Many People Showed Up For NOM’s ‘March For Marriage’ Hate Rally? Guess Who Didn’t.

Meanwhile, Mark A. Kellner at the Deseret News, which is wholly-owned by the Mormon Church, reports that 5000 people were in attendance. In a subsequent email conversation with The New Civil Rights Movement, he acknowledged it “is entirely possible that 5,000 is too high a number,” but said he agreed on a “several thousands” estimation that is over 2000.

NOM co-founder Robert P. George sits on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Desert News.

NOM also claimed last year that 10,000 people attended. Again, reports said otherwise.

Media Matters even anticipated this extreme break from reality, noting that NOM will be “grossly overestimating attendance.”

Look no further than last year’s march. Even as the Supreme Court took up challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California’s Proposition 8, NOM struggled to muster enthusiasm for the event. While NOM’s Thomas Peters declared that 15,000 people had turned out for the march and NOM president Brian Brown estimated there were “more than 10,000? attendees, the Washington Blade estimated a turnout of only 2,000.

http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/heres-what-10000-people-at-noms-anti-gay-hate-march-really-looks-like/news/2014/06/20/89565

2,000 too many. Still-- pathetic.
June 20, 2014

#YourSlipIsShowing Busts Men Who Are Pretending to Be Feminists to Attack Black Women

After it was revealed that the divisive hashtag #EndFathersDay was an orchestrated attack by 4chan members pretending to be feminist of color, several outspoken Twitter users fought back, outing perpetrators who seem fueled by their hatred toward Black women.

According to Buzzfeed, the #EndFathersDay tag was just one piece of a larger movement, dubbed “Operation: Lollipop,” which was aimed at embarrassing Black women by hoping to cause division among feminists of color.

These fake users, comprised mostly of Men’s Rights Activists, assumed the identity of women of color to co-opt the conversations about feminism, racism, and sexism that Black women have been engaging in online.


From a now defunct Operation: Lollipop Tumblr account. Photo: Buzzfeed
Once Operation: Lollipop was exposed, Black Twitter users (and their allies) began outing possible trolls under the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing.


zellie @zellieimani
Follow
The 4chan trolls shouldn't be dismissed as a prank or simple trolling but viewed as a violent act of anti-Black misogyny #YourSlipIsShowing
6:59 AM - 19 Jun 2014

Shelby Knox @ShelbyKnox
Follow
Black feminists were the targets of the plot because racism. And Black feminists fought it off handily: #YourSlipisShowing:
2:57 PM - 17 Jun 2014
39 RETWEETS 33 FAVORITES ReplyRetweetFavorite

More:http://www.clutchmagonline.com/2014/06/yourslipisshowing-busts-twitter-users-pretended-feminists-attack-black-women/
June 19, 2014

Beauty companies now want women to feel insecure about our insecurities

Ask for more money. Stop with the "up-speak". Love your body! The helpful pieces of very public advice thrown at women sure are starting to sound more like orders than encouragement. And the latest bit of go-get-'em girl guidance – a commercial from Pantene imploring women to stop apologizing for everything – has just about sent me over the edge. Because instead of just selling us physical insecurity by implying we're fat or wrinkly, beauty companies are now trying to make us feel insecure about our insecurities – all while giving themselves a pat on the back for "empowering" us to feel better (and collecting our money, of course).

Pantene is the most recent company to fall into the "confidence gap": telling women that the source of their woes isn't workplace inequality or crappy partners who don't do their fair share, but women themselves. According to this new dictum, women are self-sabotaging at work, love and life.

The shampoo giant's new ad, part of its #ShineStrong campaign – as in, the shiny hair that you'll have if you buy their product – opens with a question: "Why are women always apologizing?" Viewers are then treated to vignettes of women saying "sorry" for various non-infractions – including, but not limited to: a woman in a business meeting who interrupts a colleague with, "Sorry, can I ask a stupid question?"; a woman who takes back stolen bed-covers from her partner; and a harried mom apologizing for handing a toddler over to dad.

It's hard to disagree with the premise – it's true, these women have nothing for which they need to apologize (and yet many women still do in those situations). The same goes for Dove's incredibly popular "real beauty" campaign – yes, all body types should be accepted and loved. But there's something incredibly irritating, and crass, about beauty purveyors instructing women to "stop apologizing" or "stop hating their bodies" when many such insecurities stem, at least in part, from these very companies' advertisements.

Let's not forget, for example, that Dove's parent company Unilever not only produces the scourge-of-the-nostrils Axe Body Spray – not exactly a bastion of female empowerment – but actual skin lightening creams for women of color. Love your body ... so long as you're white?


http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/19/beauty-companies-women-pantene-sorry

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Whiteness is a scourge on humanity. Voting for Obama that one time is not a get out of being a racist card
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