Objectify This

Last week, the long-awaited passage of health care reform came at a hefty cost. Bart Stupak’s amendment to HR 3962 prevents women receiving federal subsidies from buying  health insurance that covers abortion. This attack on the reproductive rights of poor Americans may have dire repercussions for women and society, and that may be what the [...]

What if we treated rape like an actual public health crisis? Meg Stone goes into it over at Bitch. Hat tip to the ever-rad Kaveri for the link.

Sometimes, the News Media has all the answers. The New York Times reports that a recent study shows that women’s shoes hurt their feet. Women mostly have sex because “it feels good,” according to a new study reviewed on Salon.com by Tracy Clark-Flory. Also, the only sexual assault prevention tips guaranteed to work are those [...]

Trigger warning: This post contains references to rape. Anyone who reads feminist blogs has come across “trigger warnings” before graphic images or descriptions of rape or violence to women. The intent of a trigger warning is to advertise the potentially emotionally triggering content of a piece, which might revive memories of rape or sexual assault [...]

In the words of Harper’s Magazine editor Roger Hodge, the magazine’s monthly Index is “a statistical poem.” He presumeably meant that it allows the reader to experience it and come to his or her own conclusions. Today, instead of explaining a position, I offer a ‘statistical poem’ about rape. Each statistic is preceeded by the [...]

This photograph is by Francesca Woodman, a fantastic feminist photographer who killed herself in her twenties several decades ago. Her work is haunting, because she treats the female form and the objectifying gaze of the camera and manages to make it beautiful. From Johannesburg, the story of Dumisani Rebombo, one rapist repenting, asking his victim’s [...]

Hat tip to Bust for their coverage of this well-heeled event in their August/September issue: there’s a a new annual parage of feminist men who strut their stuff and walk the walk, literally. The “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes,” which bills itself as an “International Men’s March Against Rape, Sexual Assault and Gender Violence” [...]