WMC News & Features
Stopping Traffic
The worldwide child sex industry has set up shop in the United States. Mary Ann Swissler asked advocates what it would take to stop it.
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The Role Of Men In The Fight Against Sexism
There has been something I have been wanting to get off my chest for a while. As a man active in the fight against sexism in every form, I find myself looking back to my days in high school, middle sc...
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Support Women Artists Sunday: Haim
According to California-based sister trio HAIM, the origin story of their band starts with their parents’ shared love of music. As a teenager in the 1970s, their mother won an episode of The Gong Show...
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Saturday Vids: Shree Bose, Teenage Cancer Researcher
Shree Bose has inspired me since I learned that she was the Grand Prize winner of the Google Global Science Fair. As her TEDxwomen's speaker's page describes: "[Shree's] award-winning project involved...
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But I Want To Have It All
It's my nature to think in the long term. Even though I am fully aware that at the age of 18 even though I can drive, rock the vote, and go to war I still have a lot of time before I have to think ser...
WMC News & Features
Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Hypocrisy
This week, Seventeen magazine promised to publish un-photoshopped images of real girls, finally responding to 14-year-old SPARK activist Julia Bluhm's campaign. Such pressure must continue argues author Laura Bates.
WMC Women Under Siege
Cat and mouse: Syrian activists play a dangerous game on the Web
A chat pops up. Lines start pouring in to tell me that a group of men led two young girls into a van. There is little detail after that, the chat reveals, but not before I need to ask questions I am trying not to ask.
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Straw Feminism
I recently came across the concept of "Straw Feminism." Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency defines the Straw feminist as “a trope that is a deliberately created, exaggerated caricature of a femini...
WMC Women Under Siege
Bargaining away justice for women in Rwanda
Over the course of a mere 100 days, from April through July of 1994, between 500,000 and 1 million Rwandan men, women, and children were slaughtered during the Rwandan genocide. The United Nations and human rights groups report that anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000 women were also horrifically sexually violated. Testimonials of women given to Human Rights Watch following the end of the conflict indicate that almost every woman and adolescent girl who survived the genocide was raped.
WMC News & Features
Katniss and Merida—Year of the Heroic Archer?
Having consulted Geena Davis, who has played her share of strong female characters, the author asks, are two successful female-driven action movies released in one year a sign of good times to come for heroic women on screen?
WMC Women Under Siege
What are the solutions to wartime rape?
Part of Women Under Siege’s mission is to try to understand and share findings on the complexities of wartime rape in its varied forms in order to develop targeted solutions that would work effectively in different situations. We need to get a better grasp on what’s happening so we can stop it, and to stop it we need to think creatively and strategically. Here are some ideas on how to end or prevent sexualized violence in the context of various conflict situations.
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Support Women Artists Sunday: First Aid Kit
Prodigious Swedish teenagers Klara (17) and Johanna Söderberg (19), AKA First Aid Kit, have been gathering fans apace since the release of their 'Drunken Trees' EP in February 2009. They are proud to ...
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Saturday Vids: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon on Women Entrepreneurs
"Gayle Tzemach Lemmon never set out to write about women entrepreneurs. She was simply looking for a great—and underreported—economics story after leaving ABC News for MBA study at Harvard to pursue h...
WMC News & Features
Nora Ephron—An Appreciation
Author M. G. Lord knew Nora Ephron socially, but appreciated her most through Ephron's essays. She writes about why they've had only the best influence on her own writing.
WMC Women Under Siege
The best they can be? How the Army chain of command fails women
A dark screen accompanies the sounds of rhythmic drums and sinister music. The darkness fades into a chronological montage of U.S. Army propaganda, leading a viewer through an overview of military aesthetic dating from the newsreel era to the videogame epoch. From the opening frame, a new documentary called “The Invisible War” establishes the realm of an alternate military reality, far from civilian life. A woman explains in voiceover: “There’s a right way, a wrong way, and the Army way.”
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June 28, 2012 | Amanda P |
Feminism,
Violence against women
On Street Harassment
I vividly remember the first time I ever experienced street harassment. I was on my way to class and saw in the distance a group of young men drinking and carrying on in a very loud and obnoxious mann...
WMC News & Features
UK Moves to Criminalize Forced Marriage
Forced marriage, an oppression particularly targeting girls in South Asian cultures, must be addressed by Western governments as well, argues author Shiuan Butler.
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The Feminist Dilemma of Rap
Lately, I have been struggling with music -- specifically, rap. I am an African-American girl and rap is very popular not just in my culture but in my own family. I recently realized that the struggle...
WMC Women Under Siege
CPJ: Another journalist reports sexual assault in Tahrir Square
The story sounds hideously like another—one of a chaotic, predatory attack on a woman journalist in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Clothes torn from her body, hundreds of men surging to grab her breasts and claw at her. A woman wondering, “Maybe this is how I go, how I die.” It has been almost a year and a half since CBS correspondent and CPJ board member Lara Logan endured an attack like this. Now, an independent journalist and student named Natasha Smith reports that it has happened to her.
WMC News & Features
"Having it All?"—The Wrong Question for Most Women
As it has done at least once a decade for the past 40 years, the media seems intent on pitting women against each other in a "Having it All" debate about work inside and outside the home. Author and organizer Ellen Bravo explains why the discussion defies reality.
WMC Women Under Siege
What do we mean by rape in war?
For many of us, the phrase “wartime rape” evokes blurry, broad ideas of military assault, battles, and weapons. Just like the common misconceptions that surround rape in places like the U.S. or the UK (such as the idea that rape is a crime committed by a shadowy stranger in a dark alley, when, according to UK charity Rape Crisis, “only 9 percent of rapes are committed by ‘strangers’”) it is easy to make incorrect assumptions about the causes and manifestations of wartime rape.
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Perfectly Normal
I don’t have a diagnosed eating disorder and that makes me sad. That might sound like a strange thing to say, but what I mean is that I think it's wrong that my daily obsession with counting calories,...
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Support Women Artists Sunday: Gemma Ray
The early 2000s had their share of retro-soul and R&B acts, but British singer/songwriter Gemma Ray had a more complex m.o. than simply aping the greats. Reaching back to pre-Beatles rock for insp...
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Saturday Vids: Mallika Dutt -- The "War On Women" Is Bigger Than You Think
"As the Supreme Court considers key elements of Arizona’s SB 1070 law, which legalizes racial profiling of and blatant discrimination against immigrant communities and people of color, stories from ar...
WMC Women Under Siege
The ongoing tragedy of India’s widows
Widows in India have a pronoun problem. The estimated 40 million women widows in the country go from being called “she” to “it” when they lose their husbands. They become “de-sexed” creatures.