Last week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo quickly took ownership over the fall of former New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who has resigned and is facing multiple criminal investigations after the New Yorker published allegations of his physical abuse against women. Cuomo, whose office has historically navigated questions of sexual harassment, “empowerment,” and women’s equality with the grace and subtlety of a dump truck careening through a bike lane, appears to believe himself up for the job.
Category: Sexual Equality
How can businesses tackle sexual harassment? – BBC News
Employment lawyer Karen Jackson left a career in the City to start her own legal practice, partly because she was a victim herself. She spells out this reluctance.
“They know there will be a big fallout from it. There will be other people at work judging them, potentially labelling them as a troublemaker and causing problems for their career.
“I have clients who can’t tell me what has happened because they feel such a sense of shame.”
One answer is independent whistle-blowing phone lines – already used by many blue chip companies.
‘Unfuckable’ Women Don’t Go on Killing Sprees
Most of these stories had common threads: Women who feel cut off from access to sex, romance, and companionship often assume that they’re broken, that the odds are stacked against them, and they’re destined to be unlucky in love for the rest of their lives. “I spent a lot of time wondering what was wrong with me, why wasn’t I good enough, why wasn’t I fun enough,” Ashley said. “It’s isolating. It’s ugly. It’s a total mindfuck. And even as I was doing all these things to change myself and improve, I still hated myself and had this nagging feeling that my effort was pretty much hopeless.” These women feel the same sense of isolation that emanates throughout the incel ecosystem.
Yet despite the universal experience of loneliness and sexual failure, there appears to be one fairly significant difference between men and women: “I’ve never gotten anything from a woman blaming men for [their loneliness],” Shechter says. “But men, yes.” Of course, not all men blame their sexual woes on women’s failure to appreciate their value, nor on a female fixation on bad boy alpha males rather than more deserving “nice guys.” But, Shechter reiterates, “women have never said that.”
#MeToo: Emmy the Great speaks out about music industry men | British GQ
Throughout my career, I have constantly batted off exhausting banter from professional contacts that remind me of one thing: I am a body, a body, a body. Yet I often thought of myself as a machine during these moments, daydreaming of how, through sheer resilience, I would one day gather enough power to remove myself from their company. I would be interested to know how many male artists have had to think of that.
I want to refer to myself as lucky to have had relatively innocuous experiences, but that would do a disservice to those who have been through similar. As I write, I waver between two thoughts – the first that my story is insignificant and I shouldn’t make a fuss, and the second that I am terrified for my parents to read it, in case they think I’ve screwed up my life. These two positions cannot both be true. I will say that this is the first time that I’ve written an article while shaking. That’s why these stories need to continue being told.
via #MeToo: Emmy the Great speaks out about music industry men | British GQ
Key Feminist Theorists, 17th Century to Today
Olympe de Gouges, a playwright of some note in France at the time of the Revolution, spoke for not only herself but many of the women of France, when in 1791 she wrote and published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen. Modeled on the 1789 Declaration of the National Assembly, defining citizenship for men, this Declaration echoed the same language and extended it to women, as well. In this document, de Gouges both asserted woman’s capability to reason and make moral decisions and pointed to the feminine virtues of emotion and feeling. Woman was not simply the same as man, but she was his equal partner.
Understanding the Backlash Against Feminism
From her first chapter: “Behind this celebration of the American woman’s victory, behind the news, cheerfully and endlessly repeated, that the struggle for women’s rights is won, another message flashes.
You may be free and equal now, it says to women, but you have never been more miserable.”
MeToo feminism is victim culture, not courage | Comment | The Times
Moreover, modern feminism has put the Victorian sexual double standard into reverse. Tearing up the old sexual order, women liberated themselves to behave with as much sexual licence as men. Yet when men now misinterpret the signals because there are no longer any rules, women accuse them of failing to treat them with sufficient respect. And even when men grossly misbehave or even attack them, some women choose to remain silent and use such men for their own advantage.
Female emancipation was all about giving women control over their own destinies. Now they have that control, they are presenting themselves once again as powerless victims of male oppression, even while benefiting from being presented as sexual objects. In 1995, Thurman was chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 sexiest stars in film history, in 2004 she featured in Maxim magazine’s “Hot 100” and in 2013 was named one of the “100 Hottest Women of the 21st Century” by GQ magazine.
Millicent Fawcett and even Emmeline Pankhurst would surely not have said to Thurman: “me too”. They would have said: “not in our name”.
via MeToo feminism is victim culture, not courage | Comment | The Times
Suffragettes 100 years on: Meet the women fighting for females in 2018 – BBC News
Officers in the city now define misogynistic hate crime as “behaviour targeted towards a woman by men simply because they are a woman”.
That includes things like wolf-whistling and cat-calling.
“I think it’s very easy to say this is the end of flirting, but I don’t think that’s true,” says Martha.
“I think if you’re flirting in a way which you feel might be touchy ground, then you’re flirting in the wrong way.”
Martha ran around 40 training sessions for police on misogynistic harassment and now wants the rest of the UK to follow suit.
via Suffragettes 100 years on: Meet the women fighting for females in 2018 – BBC News
We Harpies Want More
Scores of women have felt raw, disheartened, and fatigued by the #MeToo news cycle over the past months for the obvious reason that these are transmissions of suffering and for many, reminders of exclusion. But the relentless news coverage is further disconcerting because these tales of horror are making some companies a lot of money, often by allowing one writer to dismiss and denigrate accusers in the same pages where another writer first broke the allegations.
Philosopher Kate Manne on ‘Himpathy,’ Donald Trump, and Rethinking the Logic of Misogyny
Manne posits that sexism and misogyny are distinct from one another. “Misogyny is law enforcement; sexism is justificatory,” Manne argues. “Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts […] Sexism is bookish; misogyny is combative,” she writes later in the book. Sexism is not the “cudgel” of misogyny, instead, it’s a set of beliefs that work to naturalize the existing order.
via Philosopher Kate Manne on ‘Himpathy,’ Donald Trump, and Rethinking the Logic of Misogyny