During the 2013 Super Bowl, Marjorie Gayle Alaniz was captivated by a commercial for Dodge Ram trucks that featured portraits of American farmers. She couldn't help but notice, however, that among the many farmers shown, there were only a handful of women. Alaniz, who comes from a family of Iowa farmers, was disappointed. "I wondered, how has this happened, that images of farms don't include women, when practically every farm has a woman working on it?" Indeed, according to the latest USDA Census of Agriculture, 46 percent of American farm operators are women.

Shortly after her Super Bowl revelation, Alaniz quit her job at a crop insurance company and started documenting women farmers in Central Iowa. The result is FarmHer, an online collection of photographs of some 40 lady farmers and counting. "The feedback has been fabulous," says Alaniz. "It's usually coming from women who grew up around agriculture or are currently involved in ag. They say, 'Thank you for showing the rest of the world that we are out here doing this, too.'"

In a landmark piece of legislation, the California Senate yesterday passed an “affirmative consent” bill for colleges throughout the state. The first of its kind, SB 967 explicitly requires schools to adopt a standard of affirmative consent, defined in the bill as:

Affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity. It is the responsibility of each person involved in the sexual activity to ensure that he or she has the affirmative consent of the other or others to engage in the sexual activity. Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent. Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time. The existence of a dating relationship between the persons involved, or the fact of past sexual relations between them, should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent.
The bill goes on to describe in detail what does and does not count — protecting, for example, people who are raped while incapacitated due to the influence of drugs, alcohol, or medication. If signed by Governor Jerry Brown, the bill will require all public colleges and other institutions receiving state funding for student aid to implement comprehensive prevention and outreach programs addressing sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence and stalking.


This image represents both affirmative consent and how I feel about this bill. Via Shutterstock.

Unfortunately, many news outlets have ‘balanced’ coverage of this important piece of anti-rape legislation by giving concerned citizens and rape apologists a platform to propagate misinformation.

The Washington Post included the following quote:

“I feel like their hearts are in the right place, but the implementation is a little too excessive,” Henry Mu, a 24-year-old biology major at California State Long Beach told the Press-Telegram. “Are there guidelines? Are we supposed to check every five minutes?”

The editors of the feminist blog Jezebel had to publicly call out their employers at Gawker Media for refusing to permanently ban commenters who spammed the site with animated images of rape and sexual assault. The popular web forum Fark.com felt it necessary to add “misogyny” to the moderator guidelines in order to combat the presence of rape jokes, as well as slut-shaming and victim-blaming language. Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda was forced to leave Twitter after receiving waves of harassment following the death of her father. And while Twitter has promised to reevaluate its policies in the aftermath of Zelda Williams’ departure, many female Twitter users, as Slate reports, still have to rely on third-party blocking tools like the Block Bot, Block Together, or Flaminga, in order to clear their Twitter feeds of harassment and abuse.


After a month like this one, it’s worth asking: Will the Internet ever be a safe place for women? This question might seem naïve. If you are a woman with an online presence, after all, you may have grown so accustomed to Internet harassment that you cannot even imagine an alternate future. A recent poll from the Rad Campaign, Lincoln Park Strategies, and Craiglist founder Craig Newmark found that 57 percent of people who experience abuse online are women.

While this data might lead one to believe that women are only marginally more affected by Internet harassment than men, Amanda Hess at Pacific Standard puts a more qualitative face on this quantitative data. Nearly three-quarters of people who report harassment to the organization Working to Halt Online Abuse, she notes, are women. Internet “accounts with feminine usernames” also receive “100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day” compared to less than four per day for accounts with masculine usernames. Hess concludes, “the vilest [online] communications are still disproportionately lobbed at women.” For women on the Internet, vitriolic abuse is simply a fact of life.

We are accustomed to thinking that the prevalence of sexist Internet harassment is a problem with people rather than a problem with technology. Accordingly, most efforts to make the Internet a more hospitable place for women are reactive approaches that seek to address problems after they take place, rather than proactive approaches that seek to prevent harassment at its technological roots. The only way the editors of Jezebel could try to stop their “rape gif problem,” for example, was to “individually” and “manually” delete comments and ban commenters. Even then, commenters could continue making new accounts and posting more explicit images. Gawker Media has since stepped in with a back-end fix that hides comments from new users until Jezebel or another approved commenter has approved them.

Anytime someone speaks up about victim blaming and the expectation that women drastically limit their own lives in order to prevent themselves from being raped, someone will appear like clockwork to go, “Yeah, well, shouldn’t people lock their homes so they don’t get robbed?”

I am not an authority on what people should and should not do (besides not rape people), but I would argue that sexual assault has vanishingly little in common with robbery, and preventing sexual assault is not at all like locking your front door.

All analogies are imperfect by definition; if they were perfect, they would not be analogies anymore, but rather comparisons between two nearly or practically identical things. You can always find spots in which analogies fail.

But the sexual assault-robbery analogy fails on so many levels that I believe it to be useless for any sort of explanatory function.

None of this is to say which is “worse.” I’ll leave those pointless exercises to Richard Dawkins. I would personally imagine that most people who have experienced both found sexual assault to be “worse,” but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they are sufficiently different that an analogy between them doesn’t really make any sense and is usually only used to silence people who speak out about sexual assault and victim blaming.

So, here’s how sexual assault is not at all like robbery.

Backed by Benny Andersson of pop legends ABBA, Sweden’s feminist party may make history by becoming the first political group to get into a nation’s legislature with a primary goal of abolishing sexism.

Feminist Initiative, led by Gudrun Schyman, wants a new definition of gross domestic product that includes the unpaid work women do at home. It also targets higher taxes to bridge the pay gap for women, a six-hour workday and an even split on parental leave. Polls show the party may reach the 4 percent threshold needed to get into parliament.

“It’s a clear alternative for left-wing voters,” said Lena Waengnerud, professor at Gothenburg University. “Even though Sweden, compared with a lot of other countries, has come far with equality, we’re not at all finished, and in the last few years not a lot has happened.”

Sweden, which in 2006 ranked the most gender equal nation on earth, has slipped to fourth after Iceland, Finland and Norway, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report. The development jars with the self-perception of the average voter in the largest Nordic economy. A Sifo poll released this month showed 47 percent of Swedes consider themselves feminists, up from 33 percent in 2010.

“There’s been a myth in Sweden that we’ve made such big strides that we don’t have to talk about it,” Schyman said in an interview in June. “It’s very obvious that there’s a gender contract in society, which in various ways treats women as if they’re worth less.”

Lauryn Hill has released a old sketch of her song “Black Rage” in honor of the people of Ferguson. Recorded in her living room, the song is set to the tune of “My Favorite Things.” Check out the lyrics after the jump.



Black rage is founded on two-thirds a person

Rapings and beatings and suffering that worsens,

Black human packages tied up with strings,

Black rage can come from all these kinds of things.

Black rage is founded on blatant denial

Squeezed economics, subsistence survival,

Deafening silence and social control.

Black rage is founded on wounds in the soul!



When the dogs bite, when the beatings,

When I’m feeling sad

I simply remember all these kinds of things and then I don’t fear so bad!



Black rage is founded: who fed us self hatred

Lies and abuse while we waited and waited?

Spiritual treason, this grid and its cages

Black rage was founded on these kinds of things.

Black rage is founded on draining and draining,

Threatening your freedom to stop your complaining.

Poisoning your water while they say it’s raining,

Then call you mad for complaining, complaining

Old time bureaucracy drugging the youth,

Black rage is founded on blocking the truth!

Murder and crime, compromise and distortion,

Sacrifice, sacrifice, who makes this fortune?

Greed, falsely called progress,

Such human contortion,

Black rage is founded on these kinds of things



So when the dog bites

And the ceilings

And I’m feeling mad,

I simply remember all these kinds of things and then I don’t fear so bad!



Free enterprise, is it myth or illusion?

Forcing you back into purposed confusion.

Black human trafficking or blood transfusion?

Black rage is founded on these kinds of things.

Victims of violence both psyche and body

Life out of context is living ungodly.

Politics, politics

Greed falsely called wealth

Black rage is founded on denial of self!

Black human packages tied in subsistence

Having to justify very existence

Try if you must but you can’t have my soul

Black rage is founded on ungodly control



So when the dog bites

And the beatings

And I’m feeling so sad

I simply remember all these kinds of things and then I don’t feel so bad!

Lauryn Hill has released a old sketch of her song “Black Rage” in honor of the people of Ferguson. Recorded in her living room, the song is set to the tune of “My Favorite Things.” Check out the lyrics after the jump.



Black rage is founded on two-thirds a person

Rapings and beatings and suffering that worsens,

Black human packages tied up with strings,

Black rage can come from all these kinds of things.

Black rage is founded on blatant denial

Squeezed economics, subsistence survival,

Deafening silence and social control.

Black rage is founded on wounds in the soul!



When the dogs bite, when the beatings,

When I’m feeling sad

I simply remember all these kinds of things and then I don’t fear so bad!



Black rage is founded: who fed us self hatred

Lies and abuse while we waited and waited?

Spiritual treason, this grid and its cages

Black rage was founded on these kinds of things.

Black rage is founded on draining and draining,

Threatening your freedom to stop your complaining.

Poisoning your water while they say it’s raining,

Then call you mad for complaining, complaining

Old time bureaucracy drugging the youth,

Black rage is founded on blocking the truth!

Murder and crime, compromise and distortion,

Sacrifice, sacrifice, who makes this fortune?

Greed, falsely called progress,

Such human contortion,

Black rage is founded on these kinds of things



So when the dog bites

And the ceilings

And I’m feeling mad,

I simply remember all these kinds of things and then I don’t fear so bad!



Free enterprise, is it myth or illusion?

Forcing you back into purposed confusion.

Black human trafficking or blood transfusion?

Black rage is founded on these kinds of things.

Victims of violence both psyche and body

Life out of context is living ungodly.

Politics, politics

Greed falsely called wealth

Black rage is founded on denial of self!

Black human packages tied in subsistence

Having to justify very existence

Try if you must but you can’t have my soul

Black rage is founded on ungodly control



So when the dog bites

And the beatings

And I’m feeling so sad

I simply remember all these kinds of things and then I don’t feel so bad!

Alexander “A.J.” Betts’ family says he was rejected in life for being gay. And in death, he was rejected for the same reason.

As KCCI News first reported earlier this week, the Iowa teen died in July of 2013 after “years of bullying” for being gay. After he attempted suicide in his family’s Pleasant Hill home, he was briefly put on life support to repair his organs so they’d be acceptable for transplant. His last moments were in service of others. Months before his death, he’d decided to become a donor.

Speaking a year later to local reporter Shaina Humphries, Betts’ mother, Sheryl Moore, shared a letter thanking the family for Betts’ gifts – his right kidney to a 49-year-old woman, his left to an 11-year-old boy, his liver and lungs to others. “I was very happy to hear that a 14-year-old boy got his heart,” she said. “He would have really liked that.”

But because of inane, outdated FDA regulations going back to the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, Betts’ eyes were deemed ineligible for donation. The FDA refuses to let men who’ve had sexual contact with other men donate blood or donate tissue because they’re considered a high risk. In March, the family of Rohn Neugebauer, a 48-year-old man who’d raised thousands for the Center for Organ Recovery and Education, was told by the same organization that he was declined from donating “lungs, kidneys, or other potentially lifesaving body parts” after his sudden death of a heart attack — because of his orientation.

When she had a similar conversation about her son, Moore told the donor network, “My response was something to the effect of ‘No, he’d never had a boyfriend. I’d never even known of him going on a date. But then I was like, I don’t know. He was 16 years old.” And with that admission, the network said it had to assume he’d been sexually active, and so his eyes and tissue were rejected. She says, “My initial feeling was very angry because I didn’t understand why my 16 year-old son’s eyes couldn’t be donated just because he was gay.”

In the biggest speech of the year, and his first major address, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi chose to speak at length about the scourge of rape and violence against women, breaking a long silence on the matter and raising the issue to major prominence.
Modi swept to office in June after the largest election in history, which saw his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win big over the long-ruling Indian National Congress. Modi’s electoral victory came just days before a horrific gang rape in the Uttar Pradesh saw two young girls murdered and left hanging from a mango tree for their village to find. The violent incident was just the latest in a string that have earned international headlines and placed a spotlight on the fact that in India “every 60 minutes two women are raped” as a 2012 United Nations-linked report found.

Though large-scale protests were mobilized — and local officials often commented to disastrous effect — the newly installed government had remained mostly silent on the matter of rape culture throughout the country. Modi changed that with his speech on Friday, India’s independence day, given without script or notes.
In speaking out, Modi challenged citizens and government alike to change the way that rape is thought about. “Today as we hear about the incidents of rapes, our head hangs in shame,” he said in his wide-ranging address. “I want to ask parents when your daughter turns 10 or 12 years old, you ask, ‘Where are you going? When will you return?’ Do the parents dare to ask their sons, ‘Where are you going? Why are you going? Who are your friends?’ After all, the rapist is also someone’s son. If only parents decide to put as many restrictions on their sons as they do on their own daughters.”