Life for women under theocracy:

The Council of Islamic Ideology has proposed a new Women Protection Bill for Punjab that allows husbands to “lightly” beat their wives for disobedience.

The proposed bill was on Wednesday discussed by the religious body, formed in 1962 under the “modern” Ayub Khan dictatorship to ensure all laws in the country conform with Islam, after a previous version drafted by the Punjab government in collaboration with women rights organizations and civil society was rejected by clerics and religious parties for being “un-Islamic” only a day after its passage into law.

That right there is theocracy – having a government body set up by a dictator to ensure all laws in the country conform with a particular religion. Religions are crap at respecting human rights, because they are more concerned with a deity’s rights. They are even worse at respecting women’s rights, because religions are artifacts of history and thus are male-centric: they write laws to control women and give men absolute power over them.

In the version of the bill discussed on Wednesday, the council recommends that husbands should ‘lightly’ beat their wives for disobedience and for refusing to wear the Hijab or take a bath after intercourse and menstruation.

And for eating sweets, and going out without permission, and talking back – just as if women were all six years old.

‘Light’ beatings are also recommended for wives who refuse sex with their husbands without a valid religious excuse, speak loud enough to be heard by strangers and donate money without the consent of their spouses.

Because god said so, that’s why. He told Muhammed and Muhammed told everyone else, so now you know.

A number of professional sanctions on women are also proposed in the bill, including a bar on participating in military combat, a ban on female nurses treating male patients and a recommendation to prevent female models from appearing in advertisements.

The bill also bans co-education for women after primary schooling and bars them from welcoming ‘foreign’ delegations or interacting with males to whom they are not married or related by blood for recreational purposes.

Shut up and pray.

Via Soraya Chemaly, I read this Washington Post piece about pornography and violence against women and girls. It’s not one that will please the choosy-choice, I’m a pornographer so don’t you dare connect porn with violence types.

A current government inquiry into sexual harassment in schools and a new cross-party campaign to tackle misogynist abuse online have all highlighted the ways in which pornography contributes to and legitimizes negative attitudes with very real impacts on the lives of women and girls.

It is crucial to understand pornography as a form of violence against women. Overwhelmingly, content is produced and consumed by men, with strikingly consistent themes. The content categories of two of the most popular tube sites — XHamster and Pornhub — reveal a dismal pattern of endless scenarios of male dominance and female subordination, categorized by specific acts, female body parts, race and age.

It doesn’t take a great awareness of cultural theory to grasp the social meaning of images of women being repeatedly penetrated in every orifice to a chorus of “slut,” “bitch” and “whore.” It does, however, require a willingness to think beyond the rhetoric of “choice,” “empowerment” and “free speech” that is invariably used by industry representatives to justify such content.

Sometimes those industry representatives are disguised as hip, knowing, awesome people, even feminists, even women.

First and foremost, mainstream pornography consists of socially sanctioned acts of direct violence against women. What would be seen as sexual violence and brutality in other contexts is par for the course in pornography, as female survivors will confirm. However, pornography does not simply function as an arena in which direct violence is sanctioned and routinized. It also functions as a form of what sociologist Johan Galtung terms ”cultural violence.”Exercised in the stories a culture tells itself — its texts, its images — it is “an aspect of the symbolic sphere that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence.” One of the things that pornography does extremely efficiently is provide an endless flow of narratives of women being treated as objects, violated or “done to.”

It’s still baffling to me that people – men – like that, like a steady diet of it, think it’s the best kind of sex fantasy.

[T]he cultural violence of pornography is usually far more mundane. Porn narratives are not simply those accessed by users; they also find their way into mainstream cultural images: the jeans advertisement that replicates a gang bang scenario; the perfume advertisement mimicking the penetration of a woman’s shaved vulva; the underwear advertisement that utilizes an “up-skirting” image. What these kinds of images do — and there is certainly no shortage of them, on billboards, in magazines, online — is cumulatively to tell us what women are about: that the defining feature of women’s bodies is that they are available and violable. Not only does pornography entail very direct forms of violence in its production; it also, in a world where violence against women is endemic, serves to naturalize and normalize such violence. As Galtung says, “Cultural violence makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right — or at least not wrong.”

But, fortunately, there is no real violence or abuse of women in the world.

Oh wait.

as another friend of Johnny's I wanted to thank you for your brave and true statement. I couldn't agree more. Thank you.

— Lawrence M. Krauss (@LKrauss1) May 30, 2016

Paul Bettany ‏@Paul_Bettany May 28
known Johnny Depp for years and through several relationships. He’s the sweetest, kindest, gentlest man that I’ve ever known. Just saying.

Lawrence M. Krauss ‏@LKrauss1
@Paul_Bettany as another friend of Johnny’s I wanted to thank you for your brave and true statement. I couldn’t agree more. Thank you.

Just saying.

Hmm. She forgot to mention something.

IS “fighters” are now apparently selling sex slaves on Facebook. As one does.

The woman is young, perhaps 18, with olive skin and dark bangs that droop onto her face. In the Facebook photo, she attempts to smile but doesn’t look at her photographer.

The caption mentions a single biographical fact: She is for sale.

“To all the bros thinking about buying a slave, this one is $8,000,” begins the May 20 Facebook posting, which was attributed to an Islamic State fighter who calls himself Abu Assad Almani. The same man posted a second image a few hours later, this one a pale young face with weepy red eyes.

“Another sabiyah [slave], also about $8,000,” the posting reads. “Yay, or nay?”

Facebook took the photos down within hours (within minutes would have been better) and it’s not clear whether the posts were marketing or commentary.

As the terrorist group comes under heightened pressure in Iraq and Syria, these female captives appear to be suffering, too — sold and traded by cash-strapped fighters, subjected to shortages of food and medicine, and put at risk daily by military strikes, according to terrorism experts and human rights groups.

You don’t say. There we were thinking they were living a life of luxury, doing voluntary “sex work” among the theocrats.

Social-media sites used by ­Islamic State fighters in recent months have included numerous accounts of the buying and selling of sex slaves, as well the promulgation of formal rules for dealing with them. The guidelines cover such topics as whether it’s possible to have sex with prepubescent prisoners — yes, the Islamic State’s legal experts say — and how severely a slave can be beaten.

Allah is merciful.

In displaying the images of the women, Almani advised his Facebook friends to “get married” and “come to dawlah,” or the Islamic State’s territory in Iraq and Syria. Then he engaged with different commenters in an extensive discussion about whether the $8,000 asking price was a good value. Some who replied to the postings mocked the women’s looks, while others scolded Almani for posting photos of women who weren’t wearing the veil.

“What makes her worth that price? Does she have an exceptional skill?” one of his correspondents asks about woman in the second photo.

Right? How much is a hole really worth, when you think about it? The hole should at least be able to make a great dinner out of minimal ingredients.

The Facebook incident comes amid complaints from human rights groups about waning public interest in the plight of women held as prisoners by the Islamic State. The organization Human Rights Watch, citing estimates by Kurdish officials in Iraq and Syria, says the terrorist group holds about 1,800 women and girls, just from the capture of Yazidi towns in the region. After initial denials, the Islamic State last year issued statements acknowledging the use of sex slaves and defending the practice as consistent with ancient Islamic traditions, provided that the women are non-Muslims captured in battle or members of Muslim sects that the terrorist group regards as apostates.

Of course. One is decent only to one’s own tribe; everyone else one is free to persecute. That’s the height of religious virtue.

Speaking of menstruation…the Independent reports:

Teenage Nepalese girls from Sindhuli, 130 kilometres southeast from Kathmandu, took pictures to document the restrictions imposed upon them during their periods as part of a campaign by charity WaterAid, challenging taboos and improving female sanitation.

Every month in Nepal, the girls are separated from their families, forbidden [to look] at the sun, touch fruit and flowers and even stay in their own homes.  In Nepal girls during their periods are considered to be ‘impure’ or ‘contaminated’.

The tradition is called Chhaupadi, popular in  western-nepalese hindu communities; it is common for girls to remain excluded from interaction with the family for up to 6-10 days, childbirth can also result in a 10 day exclusion.

The Supreme Court outlawed Chhaupadi in 2005, but of course it continues anyway.

Manisha, 14, who took part in the project explained the limitations put on her during her when she began her first period: “I stayed at someone else’s house during my first period. I wasn’t allowed to go to school and, on top of that, I wasn’t allowed to even read a book. It was a wrong belief that we shouldn’t study during menstruation.”

I hope someone at The Establishment reads this story.

Barbara Frost, WaterAid’s chief executive shared the charities motivations to conduct the project:  “The silence and stigma that surround menstruation impinges on girls’ everyday lives. Furthermore, when there are no safe, private toilets in schools, girls often skip school during their period, or drop out of school altogether once they reach adolescence. With nowhere hygienic to clean sanitary pads or wash, women and girls also risk infection”

“Being able to deal with periods in a hygienic and dignified way is crucial to women’s wellbeing. It helps women feel that they are able to play a full role in society, no matter what time of the month.”

Being able to deal with periods in a hygienic and dignified way means being able to do so in private but not in seclusion. There’s a difference. The difference of course is in who gets to decide: it has to be the girl / woman who decides.

Sushma Diyali,15: “This is the girl’s toilet of our school. We are in urgent need of MHM friendly toilet. The one we use doesn’t lock properly. If someone is inside, other person has to wait outside pushing the door for her. Because of lack of latrines in our school, we have to wait in the long line. This is very problematic for us and we are need of more girls’ friendly latrines.” (WaterAid)

Bandana Khadka, 15:  “This is my mother and sister in the picture. Here, my mother is feeding my sister with so much of love. Mother loves me very much as well. However, during my menstruation cycle I am kept separately and have to eat at distance. When nobody touches me, I feel unloved. We need lots of love and support during our menstruation but, when I am separated and treated like an untouchable I feel no love from my mother and father and I feel only hatred. I feel sad being treated that way.” (WaterAid)

This project was part of a Uk aid programme WaterAid are running across Nepal, to improve girls’ ability to manage their periods. For more information visit:www.wateraid.org

A couple of weeks ago Meghan Murphy did a detailed examination of Emily Bazelon’s NY Times article on prostitution.

Over the weekend, Emily Bazelon, a staff writer at the New York Times, published an article called“Should Prostitution Be a Crime?” What she didn’t say was that she had already answered her own question, and that she chose to distort (or outright ignore) facts and interviews in order to push a narrative in support of full decriminalization, under the guise of neutral reporting.

Her bias becomes clear early on to anyone who is familiar with the politically loaded term, “sex work,” which she adopts uncritically, claiming this is “the term activists prefer.” While Bazelon admits that most of those who speak publicly as “sex workers” are white and very privileged in comparison to most women in the industry, she doesn’t challenge the language.

So that’s weird, isn’t it. It’s a bit like taking upper management’s view of working conditions as definitive and ignoring what the people on the factory floor have to say about it.

While Bazelon centered her piece around the perspectives of those who support a legalized sex industry, she intentionally left out stories of survivors who would have disrupted the chosen narrative for her story. A woman named Sabrinna Valisce who was involved in the sex trade in New Zealand on and off for many years, both before and after decriminalization, told me she spoke with Bazelon for the piece, but that her interview was cut. Valisce was a volunteer with the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC) until about two years ago and had advocated for full decriminalization until she experienced its results firsthand.

While the Prostitution Reform Act was meant to make the industry safer for women in it and enforce safe sex practices, it’s done the opposite, Valisce says. Women were suddenly expected to engage in “passionate” kissing and oral sex without protection (called “NBJ” or “Natural Blow Job”) — things that had previously been viewed as “a betrayal of the sisterhood” and internally policed by the prostituted women themselves. “All that has gone by the wayside [due to] high competition and lowered rates,” Valisce says. “Girls are also now expected to let men cum as many times as they can within the booked time. It was never that way before. They paid once and received one service.” Under decriminalization, Valisce’s efforts to institute exiting programs were rejected full out.

Not only that, but a kind of routine violence was normalized by johns. “I’m not talking about punching and beating… [though this still does happen] I’m talking more about the everyday violence of gagging, throttling, spanking, hair pulling, rough handling, and hard pounding.” Valisce says there has been a notable rise in men’s sense of entitlement and a normalization of abuse since the new law came into effect.

Well after all…it’s legal…

When I spoke to her over Skype, Valisce said she had told Bazelon that she had worked alongside trafficked women post-decriminalization. Trafficking was hard to track, as it had been rebranded as“sex worker recruitment,” but it still went on. Nonetheless, Bazelon reported that “the New Zealand government has found no evidence that sex workers are being trafficked,” and left it at that. Bazelon’s desire to paint a rosy picture of decriminalization in New Zealand seems to have led her to expunge Valisce’s testimony from the record, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that she was the only person Bazelon interviewed who had worked under decriminalization in New Zealand.

“The things she’s said about decriminalization in New Zealand are absolute falsehood,” Valisce said.

Everything Valisce told me, she also told Bazelon. Which makes her statements about New Zealand and the benefits of decriminalization all the more shocking, and Bazelon’s choice to leave Valisce’s testimony out of the story all the more telling.

That’s just a small sample; it’s an excellent critique.

I’m upset this morning because of something that happened at the Cincinnati Zoo yesterday.

After a 4-year-old boy slipped into the gorilla enclosure on a crowded day at the Cincinnati Zoo, a security team killed the gorilla to save the child.

The zoo said in a statement that the boy “fell into the exhibit’s moat.” A male Western Lowland gorilla was in the yard with the child – and “the Zoo’s Dangerous Animal Response Team responded to the life-threatening situation and made the difficult decision to dispatch the gorilla (Harambe).”

Harambe was agitated and aggressive and injuring the child, so the zoo had no real choice. But it makes me livid and sad. The adults who let the child fall into the moat got that gorilla killed.

His family will miss him.

In 1986 a five-year-old boy fell into the gorilla exhibit at Jersey Zoo. That outcome was better.

A gang-rape in Brazil has caused outrage.

Brazilians reacted with shock after the May 21 assault came to light last week. Graphic photos and videos of the unconscious, naked teenager were posted on Twitter, and several men joked online about the attack.

Of course they did. Women are a joke, girls are a joke, rape is a joke, the degradation of women and girls via rape and social media is the most hilarious joke ever.

The authorities said the teenager had been raped in the São João shantytown on the west side of Rio de Janeiro as she was visiting her boyfriend, The Associated Press reported. The girl told the police that she was briefly alone with him but remembered nothing until she woke up naked the next day in another building among dozens of men who had guns.

…

The case has rocked Brazil, Latin America’s largest nation, and highlighted its deep-rooted problem of violence against women.

Unlike other countries that have no such problem, for example…

…no, I don’t know of any.

Demonstrators gathered in downtown Rio on Friday night with signs that said “Machismo kills” and “No means no,” Agence France-Presse reported. In São Paulo, protesters made a mural with messages that included “I like to wear necklines, that’s not an invitation to rape me.”

The girl, in brief comments to the O Globo newspaper, said: “It’s the stigma that hurts me the most. It is as if people are saying: ‘It’s her fault. She was using scanty clothes.’ I want people to know that it is not the woman’s fault. You can’t blame a robbery victim for being robbed.”

And yet people keep doing exactly that.

Oh god oh god oh god sometimes it’s time to just tell people to sit down and be quiet and stop writing anything for awhile, until they know something. It’s for their own good as much as anything. Nobody wants to be haunted forever by whatever idiotic thing she thought she believed at age 17 or 12 or whatever the age is of this tragically lost young person. It’s someone called V. Tanner at The Establishment, explaining Why We Must Stop Calling Menstruation A ‘Women’s Issue.’

That’s easy: we mustn’t. There is no “must” there. We don’t have to stop that.

For one thing who calls it that anyway? It’s not an “issue” (except in a rather antiquated sense of the word, as in “an issue of blood” – which is not the meaning here). It’s a reality and a nuisance, not an issue. There are some issues around it, like taxes on tampons and pads, but it is not itself an issue.

But whatever it is, an issue or a nuisance, it certainly is a woman’s whatever it is. Of course it is. It’s been one pretext for the persecution and subordination of women since forever. The fact that trans women don’t menstruate does not make menstruation not a women’s issue.

Also? I am very very very tired of people telling us yet more ways in which we need to erase women. So tired of it. So tired of it I could happily set fire to it, and then bury the ashes under a toxic waste dump.

But that’s just the title. It’s when you start to read the article that you realize how desperately V. Tanner needs to stop writing anything and learn things instead.

When we talk, write, and yes, even sing about menstruation, it is typically discussed from the perspective of cis women. And on the surface? That makes a lot of sense. Cis women are the majority when it comes to the demographic affected by this much-maligned shedding of uterine lining.

“This much-maligned shedding of uterine lining”??? Stop writing. Stop now, before it’s too late.

Also there’s the obligatory contempt for “cis women” and the grudging admission that there are several of us and the insistence on saying we’re “cis” at every mention. This isn’t how to social justice. Clunkyness is not a winning strategy.

However, the fact is that many cis women’s consistent framing of this biological phenomenon as a “women’s issue” does a lot more harm than many know.

What “consistent framing”? There is no such thing. Nobody bothers to “frame” menstruation as having to do with women, because of course it fucking is. How dare cis men consistently frame beards as a “men’s issue” amirite?

There’s some brilliance (we’re told) from trans people talking about how menstruation is all about them and not those horrible cis people.

Ame: Menstruating does cause me dysphoria. I feel extremely uneasy in the days leading up to my period, and it gets even worse during my period. I counteract this dysphoria by taking a contraceptive pill. I take it in a way that allows me to skip all my periods so I don’t have to deal with them, however sometimes I accidentally forget to take a pill, and end up having my period for the month. When this occurs, I opt for using tampons as I find that I’m less dysphoric with them as opposed to pads. It’s kind of like an “out of sight, out of mind,” deal.

Um…yeah? That’s not dysphoria, it’s menstruation. That’s because menstruation is unpleasant at best and disabling at worst. What do you think, it’s a picnic with Mozart playing for “cis” women? It’s not. And well done figuring out the advantage of tampons, which – don’t tell anyone! – is not exclusive to trans people.

I’m not going to read any more. But I do hope these people take a break from writing until they get better at it. These things take time.

RT talked to Maryam Namazie and Mohammed Shafiq yesterday. It was quite a disgusting display by Shafiq, and at the beginning even by the presenter – Shafiq would not stop interrupting Maryam.

Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, and Maryam Namazie, human rights activist, discussed the issue of Sharia law practices in Britain.

Mohammed Shafiq said that there are no Sharia courts: “They are Sharia councils, where people on a voluntary basis can go to get advice and get recourse according to Islamic principles.”

He added that every person of any religion is free to do that.

However, Maryam Namazie, human rights activist, said the UK government should reach a position where any type of religious arbitration, when it comes to family matters shouldn’t be allowed. She believes that it is “fundamentally discriminatory against women.”

According to Namazie, there is legal cover for Sharia courts.

“The Sharia councils call themselves courts; those who are presiding over them call themselves judges; the Muslim arbitration tribunals are using the Arbitration act,”she told RT.

Shafiq argues that politicians such as Theresa May and Prime Minister David Cameron have been employing a policy of targeting Muslims. “This is a part of neo-conservative agenda,” he says.

He believes this rhetoric comes in a climate of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred, which is perpetuated by the politicians, people in media, and other commentators. Shafiq says they demonize Muslims and their way of life.

At about 3:30 the presenter interrupts Maryam which he did not do to Shafiq.

At 4:30 Shafiq starts ranting at Maryam, accusing her of attacking Islam, constantly obsessing about it. At 5:50 he interrupts her. Then he interrupts her a second time to tell her to get a life, throwing her off stride for a second. Again @ 6:34.

The presenter interrupts saying can we give Mohammed a chance to respond! When Mohammed has repeatedly interrupted Maryam, which she did not do when he was talking. It’s incredible.

Then Mo responds and this time Maryam pays him back in kind. She had to, because he wasn’t going to let her talk without interruption, so she had to interrupt him right back, or he would have had an unimpeded chance to talk while she never did.

At 8:55 the presenter interrupts Shafiq (finally!!) to let Maryam respond. At 9:34 he interrupts her when she’s been responding to the presenter’s question for about 20 seconds. He simply will not let her talk.

At 10:18 Mo says “can I get a word in edgewise?”!

Don’t roofie your “friend” in front of these women. Or any other women, or anyone, or at all.

GUESS WHO STOPPED A RAPE LAST NIGHT?! THESE GALS!

Ok, so we’re still recovering from the events, but we wanted to tell the story. And if it seems like the photo is making light of a heavy situation, it’s because we know FB prioritizes pics AND we needed to get your attention. This is no joking matter.

Monica, Marla, and I were at Fig at the Fairmont for their delicious happy hour (“Fig at 5.” Treat yourself). I was going on about something and saw Monica staring behind and making a funny face. I stopped. “What’s going on?” After a few second she said “That guy just put something in her drink.”

Now, Fig is a nice restaurant. We were enjoying our charcuterie platter and some fancy cheeses. That type of place. They had a bottle of wine they were splitting. It seemed like a first or second or third date. After a few “Oh god. What do we do”s, I got up to find her in the bathroom to tell her. Warn her. Tell her to get up and leave this creep. Make him drink it. Something.

So, after feeling awkward hanging out by the sinks in the bathroom til she was done, I approached. “Hey! Um, this is kind of weird, but, uh, we saw the guy you were with put something in your drink.”

“Oh My God.” She said. Shocked, kind of numb, so I babbled “Yeah, my girlfriend said she saw him put something in your drink and we had to say something. Woman to woman…you know. We had to say something. How well do you know that guy?” I was expecting to hear “We just met,” but I got:

“He’s one of my best friends.”

Shit. Yeah. One of her best friends. They had known each other for a year and a half. They worked together.

I continued to talk for a bit and said she could ask “the one with the short blond hair” any questions since she was the one who saw it and then left her to return to the table.

When I got back, Marla was talking to the server about what happened. Seeing if he or the manager could do anything. Monica filled us in on more of what she saw.

“He pulled her glass toward him, kind of awkwardly, then he took out a little black vial. He opened it up and dropped something in. Then he tried to play it cool, like checking his phone and hiding the vial in his hand and then trying to bring it back down slyly.” He apparently saw Monica looking. Marla said she was just going to lean over to Monica and say “that guy is acting really creepy” when she saw Monica already looking. Witnessing.

It only took a minute for the manager to walk to their table, see if everything was ok, allowed the girl to order a sparkling water. All super cool. He stopped by our table and said he couldn’t do much because he didn’t see it. But he did let security know.

The poor woman had to sit through 40 more minutes, sitting across from “one of her best friends” knowing that he was trying to drug her. Marla noticed him several times chinking his glass to hers to get her to drink. She played it cool. Mostly, I believed, just stunned. The staff wanted to jump in and dump the glass, dump him, do something! I was going through fantasies of walking up and demanding he drink the tainted glass of wine. Eventually, they finished up dinner. There was a delay getting their bill “The computer is down” is what the waiter kept saying to him. Then, in walks Santa Monica PD. They say “Come with us” and he doesn’t protest. Doesn’t ask why. Doesn’t seem surprised.

The head of security came by and said that because we notified them immediately, they were able to go back and review the footage from the security camera.

They got him on tape. They had proof of him drugging this girl. They took the glass away as evidence. They kept us for statements. We asked the girl if she had a ride home. “My car is at his place. In his building. We came together.” Part of a plan. We were blown away. She was still in shock.

But it wasn’t over.

From every table In our section, from through out the restaurant, people came by to thank us for taking action.

“It happened to my sister…I’m glad I was there to take her home.”

“It happened to my roommate at a producer’s party. He’s still messed up from it.”

“It happened to me. At a backyard barbecue.”

“It happened to me. At a bar I worked at.”

“Some Heroes don’t wear capes. Thank you. It happened to me. Thank you.”

“Fuck yeah you guys! You fuckin rock!”

At least 10 stories of being personally affected buy someone like this. Something like this. Those were only the ones who knew what went down. I am sure there were tons more stories through out the restaurant and the hotel.

We kept thanking the manager for taking action. We are well aware how many people would not have taken what we said seriously. Not taken action. Said their hands were tied.

So thank you, everyone at Fig and Fairmont in Santa Monica for keeping this guy from harming someone.

And thank you in advance to everyone who sees this and shares this and reminds each other that yes, you SHOULD say something. Even if it’s awkward or weird or just uncertain if anything can be done.

Know that YOU did something. And that it helped.

Don’t roofie anyone. That’s not too much to ask.

A piece in the Guardian on menstruation by Bibi van der Zee and Katherine Purvis starts with this uncomfortable fact:

“Girls are literally selling their bodies to get sanitary pads,” says Dr Penelope Phillips-Howard. “When we did our study in Kenya, one in ten of the 15 year old girls told us that they had engaged in sex in order to get money to buy pads. These girls have no money, no power. This is just their only option.”

The joys of being a girl – you have this mess to deal with, and you have to engage in unwanted sex to get the money to deal with the mess.

“The persistent taboo around menstruation means that limited information is available to young women,” says Sabrina Rubli of Femme International. A study by the Canadian organisation in Nairobi revealed that 80% of girls had no idea what their period was before they started.

Oh, no – that’s horrifying. So 4 out of 5 girls in Kenya get scared out of their wits around age 12. That’s so cruel, however unintentionally.

That sense of shame, the sense of being guilty of an activity so secret that that no one will even talk about it, is then compounded by cultural prejudices and beliefs around menstruation which vary from country to country and region to region. In some cultures, it emerges, women are told that eating certain foods during their period will make them smell bad, in others women are sent away from the home or not allowed to bathe, while yet in others an association is made between menstruation and sexual activity.

An Ethiopian girl tells of how her father found her washing her underpants and demanded an explanation, she said it was nothing and he picked up a stick to hit her with. Her mother intervened, but her father said “menstruation happens only after a girl has had sex with a man” and he beat her.

Schools in particular can be full of pitfalls. There may not be adequate bathroom facilities; many have shared latrines, no locks on the doors, and no running water. According to the research, some teachers are unsympathetic and teaching methods may compound the problem. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, teachers prefer students to stand up when they answer a question, and girls often talked about their anxiety that they would have to stand up and reveal stains on their clothing.

Puberty is such hell for girls.

“Sometimes when I am in class and the teacher is teaching, I don’t concentrate on what is being taught because your mind is always on the thought that when you stand and your clothes will be blood stained and the teacher will see, hence you don’t concentrate.” Partly as a result, and partly for all the other reasons, girls often miss school when they are menstruating. The World Bank has estimated that a girl may thus miss between 10-20% of her education.

…

“‘Some people exchange sex for money,” one young girl told her interviewer. “The money is used to buy pads. Maybe she is being given money then they have sexual intercourse.’

“It’s referred to as transactional sex,” says Phillips-Howard. “But of course in some cases it is really coercive.” She worked on the 2013 and 2015 teams and also worked on further research, published last year, which drew on responses from more than three thousand women to find that one in ten 15 year olds said that they had had sex in order to get hold of money for pads. “‘She will go look for this money (to buy pads) from the men, and that’s how they can end up with the unwanted pregnancies,” one parent told the team.

Well at least it stops the bleeding for awhile.

And the long-term implications? As the researchers point out in the 2013 report: “Should others become aware a girl was menstruating, the girl would become (or was fearful of becoming) a figure of fun, being laughed at or teased. That this was so dreaded by the girls is perhaps indicative of it being seen as a form of emotional bullying. We wonder,” they ask, “if such bullying is the first step on the path towards gender abuse which females in this region become accustomed to. The context in which our study was set shows particularly high rates of gender-related physical, sexual and emotional violence, which appears to be an accepted part of life for women.”

I can’t read any more of it right now. It’s too tragic.

Like a lot of people, I don’t even know how to express my disgust and fear and shame-as-an-American that Donald Trump could be elected president of the US. How is this possible. How can so many people embrace such a loathsome sexist racist self-aggrandizing know-nothing fascist-leaning bully?

I don’t know the answer to that. I have no illusions about influencing anything, but I’ll probably point out some of his egregious awfulness now while I can. If he is elected we might not be able to.

From the Washington Post:

The Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee gave a fiery speech in San Diego and sought to leverage the power of his pulpit to shame one of this city’s federal judges, Gonzalo Curiel, who is hearing a class-action lawsuit against Trump University.

Trump delivered a lengthy monologue about the years-old case involving students who claim they were defrauded by Trump’s real estate “university.” He delved so deeply into details of the case — at one point, he talked about the origin of the name of the law firm representing him — that he seemed to lose the attention of his crowd.

Trump leveled a series of blows against Curiel. He called him “a hater of Donald Trump” and “very hostile” person who had “railroaded” him. He then taunted the judge, who has scheduled a trial for late November, after the election.

“I’ll be seeing you in November, either as president…” Trump said, trailing off. “I think Judge Curiel should be ashamed of himself. I think it’s a disgrace that he’s doing this.” Trump brought up Curiel’s ethnicity: “The judge, who happens to be, we believe, Mexican…I think the Mexicans are going to end up loving Donald Trump.”

It used to be so easy to ignore Donald Trump. I never saw The Apprentice. Trump was just the name of a joke-person. Good times.

Originally a comment by James Garnett on Help that never came.

I’m not going to pass any judgement on this poor woman. She was clearly doing something that she loved and made a mistake. That could describe any one of us, but most of us don’t pay this kind of price.

Instead, I’ll offer some information. I have been a hiker, backpacker, climber, and outdoorsman since I was a child. As an adult, I’ve taught classes on backcountry survival, especially in situations where you get lost (which is REALLY easy to do). I’ve also been a Mountain Rescue volunteer in the past, for many years (albeit not anymore).

To correct one thing in the article right away: SAR (search and rescue) people do NOT recommend that you move once you realize that you’re lost. Instead, the recommendation is to stay put. You don’t know where the high ground is if you’re in a thick forest, so don’t wander around looking for it. Stay close to where you last had contact or a fix on the trail. Dead reckoning almost always leads you astray; if you wander off, you’ll be leaving the search zone of the SAR teams that come looking for you. I can state, definitively, that SAR teams do not go looking in low-probability areas until we’ve exhausted the high-probability ones. If we think that you were hiking down Trail X, then we’re going to look closeby to that trail. We’re not going to extend the search two miles in each direction from that trail, at least not right away. Each meter away frrom the trail does far more than simply double the search area. As SAR people, we know that if we find you within 24 hours, then your chances of survival are the best. We’ll do everything we can to maximize that probability.

Some more useful ideas:

•  ALWAYS bring the Ten Essentials with you on any hiking trip, and know how to use them. They can get you out of exactly this kind of situation.
•  Take a course in compass use. Mountaineering clubs offer these all the time. They are everywhere. The Colorado Mountain Club is the one that I know well, but there are similar things all around the country. Just google for them. The courses are cheap, and valuable. Once you know how to use a compass and a map, you can get within a few feet of a target objective on the map, from miles away. I’ve done this so many times, and it still astonishes me how easy it is.
•  Remember simple facts. The sun rises in the east, sets in the west. If you know basically which direction from which you left a known waypoint, you can use these facts to get you back.
• Do not rely upon GPS. It needs batteries, and those can run out, and it needs signals from the satellites, and those can be blocked. If you are going to hike in the back country, learn to use a compass and map.
•  Learn about local flora and fauna, if possible. Lots of things are good to eat, out in the wild. Perhaps disgusting, but better than dying.
•  Last but not least: if you’re not experienced, or don’t have the skills above, do not ever go out in the backcountry alone.