Leta Hong-Fincher on Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China

In 2015, a group of feminist activists in China planned to commemorate International Women’s Day by handing out stickers calling out sexual harassment on subways and buses in cities throughout the country. For several years, they had been engaging in provocative performance art—acts of consciousness-raising that involved everything from their donning white wedding dresses doused in fake blood to call attention to domestic violence to holding street actions protesting the lack of equality in the number of women’s public toilets, dubbed “Occupy Men’s Toilets.”

via Leta Hong-Fincher on Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China

Stockton University Allegedly Fails Women After Sexual Assault

A New Jersey university failed two former students after they were assaulted, two new federal lawsuits claim.

The first suit, filed Monday, involves a Stockton University student who says she was sexually assaulted by a fraternity member at a Pi Kappa Phi house party in 2012, The Trentonian reports. (23.1% of female undergraduates expert rape or sexual assault while in school, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.) The student says she tried to report her assault to police when they broke up the party approximately one hour later, but the officer told her to stop talking about it after she told him she’d punched the frat house member in self-defense.

via Stockton University Allegedly Fails Women After Sexual Assault

UCLA Student Sues ZBT, SAE For Failing To Do More to Prevent Assault

In 2017, a UCLA student filed a Title IX complaint against another student for sexually assaulting her and won. (Her attacker, Blake Lobato, was expelled.) She is now suing two fraternities and a student group representing the interests of other frats on campus in order to change “a culture of alcohol abuse and sexual transgression,” reports the LA Times.

The civil complaint (filed under Jane Doe) accuses fraternities, especially Zeta Beta Tau and Sigma Alpha Epsilon, with “[doing] little-to-nothing to protect their members and guests from harm.” It also accuses the SAE chapter at UCLA of failing to intervene on the night she was sexually assaulted by Lobato:

The complaint alleges that Sigma Alpha Epsilon members continued to ply Jane Doe with booze although she was visibly drunk at the fraternity’s house party on Aug.12, 2016. It also alleges that the fraternity failed to provide security or supervision.

via UCLA Student Sues ZBT, SAE For Failing To Do More to Prevent Assault

Brett Kavanaugh, Sexual Assault, the Threat to ‘Every Man’

“I am willing to talk to the Senate Judiciary Committee in any way the Committee deems appropriate to refute this false allegation, from 36 years ago, and defend my integrity,” Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh said on Monday in what has now been his second statement denying sexual assault allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford.

Ford has agreed to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee but senators remain divided over whether to postpone voting on Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee or let Thursday’s vote carry on as scheduled. Trump himself seems committed to Kavanaugh’s nomination. When asked on Monday if Kavanaugh offered to resign, Trump responded: “What a ridiculous question.”

via Brett Kavanaugh, Sexual Assault, the Threat to ‘Every Man’

McDonald’s Workers to Go on 1-Day Strike Over Sexual Harassment

For Kim Lawson, who began working at a McDonald’s in Kansas City, Missouri last year, sexual harassment seemed to come with the job. Almost immediately after she started, she said, a coworker began brushing up against her numerous times and went out of his way to be near her, always standing too close. He would give her gifts, something he didn’t do to anyone else they worked with. But when she told a manager about her coworker’s behavior, no action was taken: “He still worked the same shift. He was still around,” Lawson told Jezebel. The experience soured her on reporting any harassment, so when a night shift manager began hitting on her, making lewd comments about her body, she felt like saying anything would be useless. And since he was a manager, she said, “I felt like I had to be nice about it.”

via McDonald’s Workers to Go on 1-Day Strike Over Sexual Harassment

Bravo Reality TV Star Grant Robicheaux Accused of Rape

Grant Robicheaux appeared a few years ago on the Bravo reality TV series The Online Dating Rituals of the American Male. Now, he stands accused of drugging and raping women.

Robicheaux, a surgeon in Newport Beach, Calif., in 2014 appeared in a single episode of the show, during which he went on a date with a woman who told him, “I wanna know what’s wrong with you, because you seem, like, too perfect.” Afterward, she told the camera, “He seems a little too perfect. I think there might be some dark skeletons in that closet.”

Earlier this week, Robicheaux and his girlfriend Cerissa Laura Riley have been charged with raping women with the use of drugs. Investigators say they have discovered “hundreds of videos of apparently intoxicated women believed to have been filmed” by Robicheaux and Riley, according to The Mercury News. Both have denied the charges.

via Bravo Reality TV Star Grant Robicheaux Accused of Rape

#WhyIDidntReport Goes Viral In Response to Donald Trump Tweet

It is not at all shocking that a guy who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy and has been accused of sexual assault by nearly two dozen women would embrace this line of thinking. And so, minutes later, #WhyIDidntReport was born. As of Friday afternoon, it’s the top trending hashtag on Twitter.

#WhyIDidntReport is not the first collective outpouring of sexual trauma on social media, nor will it be the last. A slew of people, including celebrities, opened up about their own experiences with abuse and the forces that kept them silent:

via #WhyIDidntReport Goes Viral In Response to Donald Trump Tweet

Brett Kavanaugh: The supreme showdown for Trump’s America – BBC News

A California professor and President Donald Trump’s pick to become the next Supreme Court justice will appear before senators to tell conflicting stories about a high school party 36 years ago.
The accuser and the accused, in the glare of the spotlight, with a lifetime seat to the most powerful court in the US at stake.
While the drama will be intensely personal, as she alleges he assaulted her and he strongly rejects the accusation, this is more than a clash of two individuals and their recollection of past events.
It also represents the confluence of two movements – one decades in the making, the other a recent, powerful groundswell.

via Brett Kavanaugh: The supreme showdown for Trump’s America – BBC News

Distracted Boyfriend Meme Is Sexist in Sweden

Here in America we are tearing our hair out over having a very bad government much of which does not consider women fully human. But in Sweden, memes are being scrutinized for sexism.

The Guardian reported on Wednesday that Sweden’s advertising ombudsman ruled that the Distracted Boyfriend meme—which was once a quaint stock photograph by Antonio Guillem called Man Looking at Other Woman, and has been forever fused to our central nervous systems I am sure—is sexist. The image was used in ads for the internet services provider Bahnhof, which assigned the labels “You” to the boyfriend, “Your current workplace” to the girlfriend, and “Bahnhof” to the second woman.

via Distracted Boyfriend Meme Is Sexist in Sweden

Women Are Turning Their Facebook Profiles Black Today in Protest of Domestic Abuse Amidst a National Conversation About Blackouts and Sexual Violence

Yesterday, a chain letter made its way through the Facebook DM’s in a coordinated effort to draw attention to domestic abuse. It reads:

Tomorrow [note: today, Sunday, September 30th] female blackout from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Its a movement to show what the world might be like without women. Your profile photo should just be a black square so that men wonder where the women are. Pass it only to women … It’s for a project against domestic abuse. It is no joke. Share it.

Outstream Video

00:00
00:00

The same effort has been made at least once before, but this blackout happens to dovetail with a conversation about the link between blackout drinking and violence toward women, prompted by allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. Unsurprisingly, alcohol is also intrinsic to domestic violence; while estimates fluctuate widely, the general consensus is that perpetrators are believed to be intoxicated in well over half of domestic abusive cases in the US. In general, researchers estimate that about half of all sexual assaults in the US are committed by men who have been drinking.

via Women Are Turning Their Facebook Profiles Black Today in Protest of Domestic Abuse Amidst a National Conversation About Blackouts and Sexual Violence