society’s issues + women’s voices
Ten minutes. I was hitting the ten minute mark of just standing in front of the freezers, seemingly debating whether to buy a quart or a gallon of milk. Or perhaps unsure of which kind I wanted. Skim or whole? Maybe 2%? I had a pensive look on my face.
It’s the look I get when I’m frozen inside. Generally from shock. Often from fear. Almost always after a harrowing experience that’s left me momentarily paralyzed.
It’s hard to accept that sexism is alive and well and that it undermines virtually everything we believe about equality, fairness, and justice. “Am I doing an injustice to the female members of this school?” This is the question 16-year old Junius Onome Williams, running in an election for his school’s student body president asked [...]
Location: 5th and Mass Avenue NW, DC Time: Night (7:30pm-12am) I was walking from my house to the Gallery Place Metro Station. I had to stop at the corner of 5th and Mass until the light changed. A teenager (probably between the ages of 16-18) asked me if I had a dollar. I usually dont give out [...]
Last weekend, two teenage boys who were popular football players from Steubenville, Ohio, were found guilty of raping a teenage girl last summer at a party. In a culture that portrays rapists as scary men in dark alleyways, the boys and many of their friends did not identify what happened as rape and even photographed [...]
A reasonable person might think that certain cases of rape would be clear cut and that it would be all but impossible to blame the victim of a crime, especially one with witnesses, photographs and other documentary evidence, for her own assault. But, we don’t live in a world where a reasonable person can think that at [...]
Or Why a “Small” Consent Revolution Needs to be a “Big” Consent Revolution The idea of consent, in terms of how we think about sex, sexual abuse, and power, is fairly new and historically radical. Laurie Penny, describing shifting attitudes about these topics, called it a “small revolution,” earlier this week in The New Statesman. [...]
These words are the full text of a poem by an anonymous rape survivor. Yesterday they were floated in the Reflecting Pool, with symbolic resonance, between the Lincoln and Washington Memorials in Washington, DC. The letters were put into the pool yesterday afternoon by the guerilla art movement FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture. Over the course [...]
“A man walks into a bar…” Every joke can be a setup for a rape joke. When rape victims turn on their TVs, they face a strong possibility of being confronted with reminders of one of the worst experiences of their lives. What’s worse, these experiences are likely to be laughed at. Rape jokes [...]
In December, a Yahoo! Group for DC’s Cleveland Park neighborhood, posted a message detailing a rape allegedly committed by an Uber cab driver a few days prior. According to the post a 20-year-old woman who used Uber, an “on-demand” cab service accessed via a smartphone app, was attacked, knocked unconscious, and raped by her driver after receiving a ride to her [...]
Januaryu 7th, 2013/ Updated Version, January 9th, 2013 Thanks to extensive media coverage, almost everyone in the country knows that Notre Dame lost their championship football game to Alabama. But despite last year’s coverage on CBS, MSNBC and the Washington Post, few Americans are aware of Notre Dame’s cover-up of rapes by Notre Dame football players. Why is the football [...]
