Jezebel posts a laughably wrong bad inaccurate headline:

The Backlash to #MeToo Is Second-Wave Feminism

You what? The hell it is. #MeToo is second wave feminism, and the backlash is third wave. Mind you I think all the waves are stupid because none of it is that simple – the resurgence of feminism starting in the late 60s was hardly monolithic. However if you’re going to talk about waves at all you should at least get them right, and second wave was a lot more radical than its predecessors; that was the whole point. Noticing and pushing back against sexual harassment was part of that. (Lately I’ve seen claims that no one had even heard of it until the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Nonsense. I went to a workplace training session on it in the early 80s.)

The Jezebel piece is about Harpers and Katie Roiphe and all that.

Though specifics of the story’s content remain unclear, it’s possible that Harper’s will publish an already familiar critique of this particular moment. Perhaps I’m wrong, and Roiphe will offer a nuanced critique of the reckoning, free from the now stock phrases and lazy rhetoric of the contrarian essay (“hysteria” “sex panic” “victimhood” and “witch hunts”). Yet, given Roiphe’s long career as a self-styled feminist provocateur, her consistent rhetorical performance as the rare rational female voice is a sea of feminist hysteria, it seems unlikely. “I address the kind of Twitter hysteria that we are seeing here,” Roiphe told the Times.

Rophie’s record on this issue is abundantly clear and follows the narrative that women and other marginalized genders are uninjured by the fiction of harassment: “The majority of women in the workplace are not tender creatures and are largely adept at dealing with all varieties of uncomfortable or hostile situations,” Roiphe wrote in the New York Times in 2011. “Show me a smart, competent young professional woman who is utterly derailed by a verbal unwanted sexual advance or an inappropriate comment about her appearance, and I will show you a rare spotted owl.”

Very Spiked – Ella Whelan – Brendan O’Neill sort of bullshit, in short. It’s what she got famous for as an undergraduate in the 90s.

If Roiphe’s arguments, laid out in service to long-forgotten sexual harassment allegations leveled against the equally long-forgotten Herman Cain, sound familiar, it’s because they are. The New York Times published almost identical arguments last week in the form of a critique of the #MeToo movement, written by Daphne Merkin. Similar sentiments were expressed by 100 French women, including actress Catherine Deneuve and writer Catherine Millet, in an open letter in Le Monde, who said: “we do not recognise ourselves in this feminism” that holds male predators accountable for a spectrum of abuse.

The backlash to #MeToo is indeed here and it’s liberal second-wave feminism.

Nooooooo. Completely wrong. It’s third-wave feminism that is liberal-libertarian; second wave is more radical, not less. Katie Roiphe was part of the backlash against “second wave” feminism. To repeat: that’s what made her famous.

As the #MeToo conversations have escalated, prompting critical reconsideration of what constitutes a violation in the workplace and beyond, liberal second-wave feminists have been a prominent voice in bringing the reckoning to a premature conclusion, suffocating this deeply-needed cultural moment. Armed with a self-identified feminist conviction, they are often quick to deem the criminality of brutal physical attacks as the barometer for abuse—dismissing the precariousness of women rendered by institutional discrimination as self-imposed victimhood. Their use of feminist principals to justify their hesitancy in this space has become the new “I’m a feminist but…”—an empty gesture at best, a need to claim allegiance to old power structures while also asserting feminist credentials.

No, no, no, no, no. Stassa Edwards is making a fool of herself. She seems to be thinking “second wave: old: therefore conservative: therefore shutting down MeToo.” But no. It’s anti-feminists and conservatives who are trying to shut down MeToo: women like Christina Hoff Sommers. Sommers is not a second wave feminist. I don’t consider her a feminist at all, but the right adjective would be libertarian.

But one of the most powerful facets of #MeToo has been the beginning of a full-fledged dismantling of those exact power structures—be they work, institutions, legacy companies, prominent and highly-esteemed figures, and the biggest manifestation of power of all: every single time one of us looked away to protect one of the aforementioned reputations.

Fark. That’s why we’re part of it. It’s not our fault that it took the enormity of Harvey Weinstein to get people to pay attention at last.

What this moment exposes very cleanly about liberal second-wave feminists—and their shortcomings on the reckoning— is that they are still preoccupied with maintaining an established social order that—for both better and worse—has been profoundly ruptured by this moment. Donegan’s account was radical; anonymity insured by solidarity, and risk reduced. But the response, especially those that labored over form, imperfect method, and chastized recklessness of the list, smacked of this kind of limited liberal feminism, indebted as it is to the preservation of institutions and empowerment through them.

The ignorance of her.

The people at Jezebel should be embarrassed.

Speaking of immigrants, speaking of immigrants from African countries, speaking of immigrants from what Donald Trump is pleased to call “shitholes” – news outlets today are talking about Emmanuel Mensah, who came to New York from Ghana.

The Times did a story on him on December 29th.

Emmanuel Mensah was a handsome, strongly built young man in his late 20s who immigrated to the Bronx from Ghana five years ago. He joined the Army National Guard but returned to his apartment on Prospect Avenue in December, after graduating from boot camp with the rank of private first class.

And on Thursday night, he lost his life trying to save people from his furiously burning apartment building, one of 12 people to die in the blaze.

“He brought four people out,” said his uncle, Twum Bredu, who lives next door. “When he went to bring a fifth person out, the fire caught up with him.”

He was living in the apartment of a couple with four children.

Private Mensah, a decorated soldier who had been awarded a medal for marksmanship and was planning to join the military police, got that family to safety, then pulled out four more people, his uncle said, before returning to the building.

He never emerged; the authorities said he died of smoke inhalation.

Well at least President Shithole has canceled his trip to the UK, knowing how much they hate him over there.

Donald Trump has shelved plans to open the new US embassy in London next month, according to reports.

Concerned about the welcome he would receive in the UK, the President is understood to be sending US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson instead.

…

Mr Trump had been due to come to London to open the new £750m embassy, but was said to have abandoned the idea as he feels unhappy about the scale of the visit and the arrangements made.

He is said to be unhappy about the lack of “bells and whistles” surrounding the event and the fact he would not be able to meet the Queen.

Good good good good. More of that. He needs to understand that everybody hates him and that it’s because he’s so poisonous and awful. Normally I don’t wish that on people, but he’s an outlier.

The disgust-horror at menstrual blood kills another woman.

KATHMANDU, Nepal — The last time anyone saw Gauri Kumari Bayak alive, she was gathering grass and firewood. Considered impure because she was menstruating, she was about to sleep outside in a cold hut.

She never woke up.

According to the police, Ms. Bayak is the latest victim of a very old tradition in rural Nepal, in which religious Hindus believe that menstruating women are unclean and should be banished from the family home. She was found dead on Monday, apparently having asphyxiated after building a small fire inside the hut to keep warm.

Get outside, woman, with your disgusting shedding of the endometrium that is every human being’s first source of nourishment and survival. Get outside into the cold. We’ll stay in here where it’s warm but you have to go out into the cold because you have that kind of body that can grow a human and then push it out into the world. Get out.

In Nepal, one of Asia’s poorest countries, dozens of women and girls have died in recent years from following this tradition, despite activists’ campaigns and government efforts to end the practice.

Menstruating women often trudge outside at night to bed down with cows or goats in tiny, rough, grass-roofed huts and sheds. Many have been raped by intruders or died from exposure to the elements.

But at least their icky blood was out of the house.

The government of Nepal is taking steps to make it illegal to force menstruating women outside, but they’re going slowly.

All of this, of course, was too late for Ms. Bayak, 22, who has been described as a talented, highly motivated young woman. Her family said she had been teaching illiterate women to read while finishing her own high school degree, and sewing dresses at night.

No more high school, no more teaching other women, because now she’s dead…because she menstruated.

Radha Paudel, a Nepali women’s rights activist, was struck by the fact that Ms. Bayak’s family was relatively educated and well off.

“This is what makes me upset,” Ms. Paudel said. “Even people who consider themselves very sophisticated, very educated, very cultured, they are still doing this, because of religion.”

The practice is called chhaupadi, which in the Nepali language means something like “tree omen.” The vast majority of Nepal’s population is Hindu, and in ancient Hindu culture, menstruating women were considered toxic — if they entered a temple, they polluted it; if they handled the family’s food, everyone would become sick; if they touched a tree, that tree would never bear fruit.

Screw ancient Hindu culture. Get over it.

Last summer, another young woman died while following the chhaupadi ritual. That woman had been banished to a small hut where she was bitten by a poisonous snake.

“What this is, is segregation,” said Ms. Paudel, the activist. “And we as a society don’t talk enough about it. We don’t talk about dignity, we don’t talk about women’s rights.”

Adam Zyglis

Robert Reich offers some optimism (and a way to make a difference for those of us in the US):

Every time I post about another outrage perpetrated by Trump and his enablers, several of you ask “What can I do?” The answer is to do what hundreds of thousands are already doing – join with others in Indivisible groups to “kick the bums out,” as the old saying goes.

It’s working. Yesterday, one of the most right-wing members of Congress, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA 49), announced he will not seek reelection. Issa is the second California Republican to retire this week. He joins a growing list of GOP House retirements.

One reason for Issa’s – and the other GOP retirements – is the work of Indivisible groups. Indivisible groups in San Diego showed up to Issa’s office 49 weeks in a row with an average of 370 constituents each week, to let him know what an awful job he was doing and how strong the opposition wold be to his reelection. (Yesterday, Indivisible San Diego and other groups from their district held a retirement party for Issa.)

A wave of Republican retirements will help take the big, blue wave across America on Election Day, November 6, 2018, replacing people who don’t represent what’s best about America with those who do – diverse, progressive, local leaders.

So, in the midst of all the gloom and outrage, please know that America is rallying – and please get back to work to take back the House and hopefully the Senate as well. Get involved with your local Indivisible group, register to vote, and read up on how we’ll hold our MoCs accountable for their vote on the #TrumpTaxScam.

More on that arrest of a teacher who objected to a pay raise for an administrator.

Deyshia Hargrave previously spoke out against the Vermilion Parish School Board (VPSB) for voting to give the standing superintendent nearly $30,000 raise, which she claimed was a “slap in the face” to hard-working teachers who haven’t seen a boost in pay in years.

…

Since those in attendance at Monday’s board meeting were allowed to comment on superintendent Jerome Puyau’s pay raise, Hargrave chose to make mention of the “serious issue” she had with such action occurring.

“I have a serious issue with a superintendent or any person in a position of leadership getting any type of raise,” Hargrave said before the board and others in attendance. “I feel like it’s a slap in the face to all the teachers, cafeteria workers and any other support staff we have. We work very hard with very little to maintain the salaries we have.”

Hargrave also questioned Puyau directly on why he was willing to essentially take a pay hike that would affect the salaries of Vermilion Parish teachers, to which a school board member claimed her comments weren’t “germane to what’s on the agenda.” Hargrave continued to press the board members further, but she was eventually escorted out of the meeting by an officer on site.

And then the officer on site handcuffed her for no apparent reason, not to mention pushing her to the floor.

But the board still thinks she had it coming.

“Everybody wants to side on the poor little woman who got thrown out,” Anthony Fontana, the VPSB president, said to WAFB. “Well, she made a choice. She could have walked out and nothing would have happened.”

Erm. She made a choice to ask the school board questions at a public hearing. Is there some compelling reason she should be forbidden to do that, and roughly arrested if she does do it? A member of the board said her question was not germane to their agenda, but it’s far from clear why it wasn’t.

It’s true that people can always make a choice to avoid asking troublesome questions in order to avoid being roughed up, but that shouldn’t be necessary in a free society.

Mei Fong asks how much more are men paid.

About 50 percent, in the BBC journalist Carrie Gracie’s case. Over the weekend, Ms. Gracie quit as the broadcaster’s China editor and announced she was returning to London. “Enough is enough,” she wrote, in an astringent open letter, describing how she discovered last year that the BBC paid two of its four international editors — men, of course — 50 percent more than the female editors.

(I think it was closer to twice as much.)

It says something when it’s considered an advancement for women just to get to the bargaining table and ask for equal pay. Many of us never even get that far.

More than a decade ago, I was coming off a successful summer stint as a Wall Street Journal reporting intern. Naturally, I vied with other interns for a full-time reporting job. A post came up in the Hong Kong bureau. Did I, a Cantonese speaker with prior Asian reporting experience, get it? I wasn’t even asked to apply. Instead, a fellow intern with no prior Asia experience was hired. He was white.

There were no doubt other variables, but still that seems odd.

Last year, the Independent Association of Publishers’ Employees reported a persistent wage gap between men and women employed by Dow Jones, The Journal’s parent company. The report found that full-time female employees make on average less than 85 percent of what their male counterparts earn, even when accounting for differences in age and location. And there is a distinct and persistent gap between pay for men and for women, even when they hold the same job title and have worked the same amount of time. Dow Jones female employees in New York — hardly a cheap place to live — made $10,000 less than their male counterparts, and $13,000 less in Washington. Multiply that difference over the span of a career and that’s the home you can never buy, or several children’s college educations.

Ok but on the plus side, you get lots of sexual invitations on the job.

Our understanding of China would be hugely diminished without the contribution of many outstanding female correspondents. There was The New Yorker’s China correspondent Emily Hahn, who wrote the first authoritative biography of the Soong sisters and had met both Mao and Zhou Enlai. (She frequently complained in letters home of being underpaid and financially strapped.) Or Time magazine’s Annalee Jacoby, who had to work around the War Department’s rules forbidding female correspondents. Rather patronizingly called the “girl reporter of this war” during World War II, she co-wrote the best seller “Thunder Out of China,” chronicling the Chiang Kai-shek era. Ms. Jacoby would later give up her foreign correspondent career for marriage and motherhood.

The case for equal pay is the case for better reporting. Pay women equally to men and more women will stay in the business; more women lessens the preponderance of male viewpoints and allows a clearer presentation of how things are. Certainly female reporters who covered the Vietnam War have made the case that their gender frequently helped them look beyond a near-fetishistic coverage of guns and bombs to the real costs of war.

To put it another way, it would be quite a good idea to get the whole human story and not just half of it.

There’s that teacher in Louisiana who was arrested and handcuffed for asking questions at a school board meeting about why an administrator was getting a raise while teachers hadn’t had a raise in years.

Deyshia Hargrave had a question for the Vermillion Parish School Board: Why was the superintendent getting a pay raise when teachers like her and other school employees hadn’t had one in years?

“I feel like it is a slap in the face of all the teachers, cafeteria workers and any other support staff we have,” she told the board in a public meeting Monday. “We work very hard with very little.”

What happened next might have stayed in the tiny Louisiana town of Abbeville, about 150 miles west of New Orleans. But captured on videotape and viewed nearly 2 million times on YouTube, it became an international incident. The school board reportedly received death threats from around the world, as local parents and teachers planned their own protests.