acid attacks in pakistan

“[TW: rape]
When we talk about “teaching men not to rape”, we are not saying that rapists do not understand consent, but rather that rapists are not taught to respect consent — as well as to respect the humanity of the women they might otherwise choose to rape….
When we teach men not to rape because women deserve bodily autonomy and boundaries, then men learn not to rape because rape is wrong and it makes them a bad person. When we teach men not to rape because it’s not necessary and there are lots of other, more valid ways to get sexual gratification, then men learn not to rape because they’ll be rewarded if they don’t. You don’t get cookies for not being a rapist. Nor should you.” — Ana Mardoll, Please No More Dating Guides at Shakesville
(via seebster)

Heads up, y’all.

queensassyofthefatties:

c00tiebreath:

rape—princess:

rape—princess:

This guy (http://4bdsmsluts.tumblr.com) is a predator and is very clearly using BDSM as a conduit for abuse, especially since he encourages newbies to “learn” from him when he has TERRIBLY fucked up views of how D/s actually works. Avoid. This. Creep.

P.S. I am NOT condoning or encouraging hate mail. I just think you ladies should be aware of potential abusers. I recommend just putting him on ignore, for your own safety. Please reblog this so more people can be aware. <3

I’m almost certain he’d rape someone and then call his victims his ‘slaves’.

So, uh TW for rape if you ever go to his blog.

He’s basically just like my ex so right now I’m just…trying not to throw up.

stfuconservatives:

shortformblog:

mauricecherry:

SendGrid Fires Company Evangelist After Twitter Fracas

Trigger Warning: Rape, Physical Assault

My heart and my support go out to Adria.

Also, my righteous anger.

Here’s the gist of what happened. Adria was at PyCon, a developer conference, and noticed that two men behind her were making lewd sexual jokes. She snapped a photo, tweeted it, brought up the behavior to PyCon officials (since they did have a code of conduct for their conference), and the situation was “handled”.

What’s happened after that is a prime example of why women and people of color (and women of color, of course) are few and far between in the world of tech.

One of the men making the jokes, who was there representing his employer, got fired for his actions. Adria’s website starts getting DDoS attacks, as does her employer’s website. People are leaving her nasty comments and she’s been getting death threats and rape threats tweeted to her since yesterday.

Today, SendGrid fired Adria. And they didn’t just fire her, but they announced it on Twitter and on Facebook so people could spread the word and comment on it. The Facebook comments are particularly vile, including one where a man details a particularly gruesome threat against Adria, concluded with the words “Make her pay. Make her obey.”

All of this for speaking up about something which made her uncomfortable.

Read More

To say that this is problematic would be an understatement, and it’s particularly troubling in a week when we’ve already seen two high-profile (and altogether disturbing) responses to sexual assault cases capture media headlines. We can’t figure out what possible justification SendGrid  thinks they have for terminating Adria — and don’t even get us started on how they handled it — but if you’re as curious as we are then here’s SendGrid’s contact information. 

Inexcusable.

Get angry. Make noise.

buggerygrips:

If this makes you as angry as it makes me, then contact his publishers and/or sign this petition calling for him to be fired from his £700k a year job as a writer.

Lucy Meadows was a primary school teacher who did nothing other than to transition while keeping her job in the school. Unable to get her fired under the equal rights act, the more bigoted members of the community contacted the Daily Mail, and Richard Littlejohn wrote a column personally attacking her. He used the young children that she taught as a weapon, insisting that the transition would “damage their innocence”, referring to Miss Meadows as “he” throughout and declaring that she was putting her own wants above the well-being of the children she taught.

She was subsequently harassed by the press, all because she dared to transition and keep living her life like any other normal human being.

The Daily Mail only removed all mention of Miss Meadows from its article after she killed herself this week.

chroniclesofathugnerd:

energiesoftheuniverse:

super-villains:

Steubenville football players drug, kidnap, and gang rape unconscious girl, call themselves “Rape Crew”, tweet about it, take pictures of it, and video tape it. They are essentially sentenced to 1-2 years. The media bends over backwards to portray them sympathetically.

Marissa Alexander fires a warning gunshot to defend herself against abusive husband. No one is hurt. She is sentenced to 20 years. 

Disgusting

Fuck.

This is rape culture. This is misogyny.
Literally every day we are reminded: We are not safe. We cannot rest. 

toomanystarstocount:

TW: Domestic violence and violent imagery, victim blaming

rapeculturerealities:

thepoliticalfreakshow:

Blaming The Victim: Internet Responds To Gripping Domestic Violence Photoessay By Blaming Photographer and Victim, Rather Than The Abuser, For Domestic Violence [TW: Domestic Violence, Victim-Shaming, Abuse Apologism, Abuse Culture, Abuse Enablism, Violence, Child Abuse, Child Neglect]

This week, the Internet got angry at Sara Naomi Lewkowicz. The 30-year-old photographer had the audacity to photograph domestic violence – and to publish the photos in a major magazine just as Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.

In the photos, we see a 31-year-old man named Shane throw his 19-year-old girlfriend Maggie against a set of kitchen cabinets. He traps her with his body against a kitchen counter. He chokes her. At one point, her 2-year-old-daughter walks in and stamps her feet as she sees what’s happening.

The Internet thinks this is Sara’s fault.

Sara’s photo essay, earlier called “Maggie and Shane” and originally published at fotovisura.com, was published Wednesday as “Photographer As Witness: A Portrait of Domestic Violence” in Time’s “Lightbox” photography feature. The 39-frame story is edited down from photos taken in three visits with the couple over roughly as many months.

Commenters at Time think Sara is unethical for not trying to stop the beating. They accuse her of voyeurism; of choosing “an awesome photo spread over critically need help”; of lacking empathy; of exploiting children.

It matters little in such heated discussions whether any of this is true – or demonstrably untrue (as much of it was when the comments were made). One example: Sara called 911. All of that takes a back seat, in these heated comments threads, to something much easier and more visceral: righteous blame.

Many of us are familiar with the phrase “blame the victim,” and there’s no shortage of that in the comments, at Time, on Sara’s essay. Here’s a sampling of the ideas you’ll find there: Maggie, the beaten girlfriend, should have seen this coming. Maggie stays because she likes it. Good riddance, Maggie was cheating on her then-estranged husband anyway … etc. In classic form, one insists of Maggie, “She is not the victim. She is the perpetrator.”

If there’s a single thing about which the critics shouting about Maggie and Sara in Time’s comment section seem to agree, it’s this: The only adult in the house during the assault who isn’t responsible for the violence is the man committing it.

There are limitless variations on the lies people tell themselves about women like Maggie who are beaten by their partners. The truth is so much more straightforward: Women are abused by men who are abusers.

Abuse may have accomplices (e.g., drugs, alcohol) and catalysts (e.g., a bad day at work, a fight with the kid) but whatever context clings to the commission of abuse does not change something many of us apparently still can’t easily admit: Abuse is committed by abusers, who alone are responsible for their violence.

Sometimes this truth, too, has an accomplice: the camera. Donna Ferrato, the first person to extensively and visually document women who’ve survived domestic abuse, has been taking pictures like these for 30 years. No one ever wants to see them, she says, because they make people nervous, anxious. And for good reason. “The camera catches truth, in action, from all different sides,” she told me. It is “the most powerful kind of weapon.”

So maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that a young, female photographer who wielded such a powerful weapon against violence in a society that prefers to keep invisible, and that so often blames victims, finds herself, too, showered with blame.

To be sure, it feels like there are things missing from this story. Time opted not to publish details about the 911 call – made from Sara’s phone, which she had to take back from Shane in the midst of the fight — even though Sara had previously written them in response to an earlier round of this same controversy at fotovisura.com (where the pictures went up in December). Paul Moakley, Time’s Lightbox editor, told me he felt their written version, which said only that Sara was “confirmed” someone else had called 911, was “much clearer” without the extra details.

But those details matter. Viewers I talked to felt differently when they knew that there were two other adults, friends of Shane, in the house. They felt differently when they knew that Sara physically retrieved her cellphone from Shane’s pocket – he had borrowed it to call Maggie when she left the bar angry at him, and with their shared cellphone, and she hadn’t gotten it back before the argument escalated. She put herself at risk to do that; she snatched it from his pocket as the assault was still happening – and handed it off to one of those adults, instructing him to call 911. They felt differently when they knew that Sara is a tiny 5-foot-2 – all details available with the fotovisura.com version of the story.

And I would bet that those who criticized Sara for the frame that includes 2-year-old Memphis crying in the kitchen as Shane beat her mother, those who argue that Sara should have put the camera down and removed the toddler from the danger, would feel differently if they knew what Sara told me: “When I took that, I pressed the button, it took like three frames of this little girl, and then the other adult was in the room picking her up and taking her out. It literally lasted a matter of seconds.”

In one caption, Sara writes that Shane tried to coax Maggie into the basement by offering Maggie two options: keep getting beaten in the kitchen, or they go “talk privately” in the basement. But there’s a clause that’s not in the caption: “What he said was — he pointed at me at one point and said, ‘Because it’s none of her fucking business.’”

If you look at Sara’s full-body portrait of Shane before he begins hitting Maggie – neck tendons inflamed, muscles taut, mouth opened wide in a shout – you might guess that there would likely have been no conversation in that basement, that the violence would have escalated. “How bad” isn’t a guessing-game worth playing.

“[Maggie] just kept saying no, I’m not going down there with you,” Sara told me. “That’s the big thing I thought about – if he was willing to do that with a camera there, what would he be willing to do if they were alone? That scares me to think about.”

In case it isn’t clear, it is reasonable to think that Shane thought he was holding back for the camera. It seems reasonable to think that Shane thought what he was doing was harmless enough that even people whose fucking business it wasn’t could watch. It seems reasonable to think Maggie believed the photographer-witness to be her best bet for safety. It would, therefore, it seems to me, be reasonable to think that the act of documentation was not merely passive; it was also protective.

And something else: It may seem strange to say so, but there is also victory in Sara’s essay. Ann Jones, who has been writing about violence committed against women for the last 20 years, says the officers’ responses to the 911 call show progress. “The arresting officers here, judging by the captions of the photos, were great. That officer says to Maggie, ‘You know this is going to happen again. They keep doing this. They only stop when they kill you.’ When we started work on this in the battered women’s movement, police were taking the guy’s word for it, not taking a statement from the women, blaming the women for causing the situation in the first place, saying there’s no point in arresting because the women won’t press charges. Prosecutors weren’t pressing charges as they should have,” Jones remembers. “It was all on the women.”

There’s also victory of a kind for Maggie: She files a complaint against her abuser, and she leaves him, two things many women in abusive relationships are reluctant to do.

“People don’t give Maggie enough credit,” says Sara. “She left. I just wish the story would be about her, not me. I’m just a freaking photographer.”

But why confront our discomfort about images when we can instead confront the photographer? Why challenge the perpetrators who commit, and the structures that underpin, this violence when we can blame its victims – and, when the evidence of violence is still too powerful, its witnesses?

Maybe that’s too cynical. It is, at least, for Sara. “I’m excited that this is proving people want to talk about this. People want to address this issue. Bottom line, I think it’s got people addressing domestic violence.”

thisisrapeculture:

Made rebloggable by request

Here y’all go. How Slut Shaming Becomes Victim Blaming by YouTuber chescaleigh.

Trigger Warnings for rape, victim blaming, internalized misogyny, general distress, etc. It’s hard to watch, folks. But if you can stomach it, it’s worthwhile.