Calida, 35, is a Chicago-based sex worker who has depended on
websites that host classified ads, such as Craigslist and Backpage.com,
to meet and screen clients. But the US government’s recent crackdown
on those platforms has abruptly eliminated many workers’ primary source
of income, forcing some to turn to the streets or to rely on abusive
pimps, greatly increasing the risk of violence.
“Girls are going back to the streets and they are going to die in the
streets, and nobody cares,” said Calida, a mother of two, who said she
used to do street work and fears she will have to start again to make
ends meet. “Everybody is terrified.”
Congress recently passed legislation with bipartisan support that purports to combat online sex trafficking
by making websites criminally liable for users’ content. But some say
the Online Sex Trafficking Act (Fosta) and Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking
Act (Sesta) will have the opposite effect. Critics argue that the
legislation broadly censors
online speech, takes income away from people who engage in consensual
sex work, and helps traffickers get away with crimes by pushing the
industry underground.
Sex worker rights groups have long argued that initiatives targeting
child trafficking end up hurting the most marginalized workers by
broadly criminalizing the industry. That includes queer and transgender
people, the homeless and others who have been excluded from traditional
employment. Defenders of Backpage and Craigslist say those sites gave
workers control over their jobs and allowed people to detect and report
traffickers.
Kristen DiAngelo, executive director of the Sex Workers Outreach
Project of Sacramento, said her phone had been ringing off the hook
since the seizure of Backpage: “The fear is astronomical.”
One
woman told her she was forced to return to an abusive client due to the
lost income, she said. Others have resorted to taking on “managers” who
have leverage over the women and their income and could exploit them,
she added. “Very easily, you can lose control of your own life.”
“This bill is creating an actual market for pimps,” Calida said,
adding: “People don’t know if they are going to be able to pay rent …
how they are going to afford food.”
dystopia au where we are all assigned one of two chosen genders at birth
Thanks to ultrasounds, the genders can be assigned before birth. The people are so excited to conform they throw “Gender reveal parties” to make sure their offspring exist in a strict binary since before they can even form thoughts.
Children are color-coded according to their binary assignment.
One of the genders is seen as inherently inferior.
This all sounds really effing creepy when you put it that way
#BECAUSE IT IS
And if you deviate from the assigned gender you can be disowned by your family, fired from your job, and beaten by authorities.
I saw this tagged as transphobia and while the laws and atmosphere that surrounds this is very much grounded in transphobia, I think it’s worth mentioning that that’s a cis woman.
So you know.
Fucking thanks, TERFs. Aren’t you glad bathroom laws trying to prevent “men” from entering the ladies room has caused two male police officers to eject cis women from the bathroom already? Since that’s the only women you care about maybe you might actually spend longer than .5 seconds thinking about possible fucking reprocussions of this shit now.
Oh my goooooddddd this shit is ridiculous. Like, this law has always been complete and utter transphobic bullshit, but here’s the god damn proof it will never work the way these idiots want it to. You cannot determine someone’s gender by the clothes they wear. Fuck, I get misgendered and called a man all the time. Do I need to bring my I.D. next time I take a shit? I am so tired of this garbage. Let people use the damn bathroom they want to.
But this is exactly the outcome of laws like this: policing and punishing people who deviate from the gender norm. The direct target is of course trans people (with the brunt of the focus on trans women), but anyone who doesn’t fit with the norms will also be impacted by the law because now there’s a witch hunt against anyone who doesn’t seamlessly blend in.
Isn’t it terribly ironic that this law was intended to prevent men from entering a woman’s bathroom and harassing women (which wasn’t actually happening) and it has directly resulted in male police officers entering the women’s bathroom and harassing a woman?
If you’re horrified at cis women being treated like this, you sure as shit better be horrified at trans women being treated like that too.
There have been at least 3 other incidents of cis men entering women’s bathrooms under the guise of “protecting” them from trans women. These bills literally gave cis men a better excuse for invading the women’s restroom.
I wish I had the time/mental energy/focus to write something really long and important about this but it’s bugging me enough that I had to get something out.
One of the things that is really, really useful about genderbend/rule 63/sex swap/whatever you want to call it (and I understand there is Discourse around this issue, but I don’t want to get into it here because that’s Another Issue Separate From This One), is examining how audience reaction to certain personality traits and behaviours changes or doesn’t change.
One thing you’ll notice about Naruto characters (and many other media, but here we’re talking specifically about Naruto to narrow the focus) is that there are many female characters who:
1. have a Temper 2. express this temper by hitting male characters (and it is Always Male) 3. distortion is used to emphasize that their hitting is a silly thing, comic relief
This trope relies heavily on the idea that women can’t really be a threat to men.
It’s notable that Sakura, who was probably #1 for this trope in original Naruto, is never shown hitting her daughter Sarada or even getting scary-angry at her; instead, she once (and only once!) takes out her frustration by striking the ground and accidentally destroying her house.
In contrast, Hinata, who never shows this kind of temper in the original series, several times is depicted in this light with regard to her son Boruto. But she is never shown doing this to Himawari. Poor Temari gets reduced to only this trope in Boruto.
There’s a misogyny to this trope and it’s made worse by people often reacting to it by blaming the female characters themselves, as if they were actual people with agency instead of characters written almost entirely by men.
“If Sakura were a man, people wouldn’t find him smacking Naruko around funny” they say, and I say “Yes! That’s true!” and then they continue “and that’s why Sakura is a bad character and a bad person” and I’m like “Nooooooooooo how can you get so close yet so far!”
The key aspect about this female character behaviour is that female anger against men is impotent. It has no lasting power. The male characters are always fine in the very next scene.
We don’t assume male violence is impotent, ever. We take furious men, especially when their fury is turned against female targets, as a serious threat.
This cannot be separated from the fact that in canon Naruto, female characters never, not once, have a solo victory against a male character that isn’t immediately undercut. (Sasori “let himself be stabbed” etc.)
Female characters are only allowed to have unqualified victories against other females. And this is why this comedic female anger is not directed against female characters.
This does relate to male victims of female abusers in real life and how they are often dismissed. But M//RA types get it wrong when they think that women/feminism is to blame for this. This trope props up toxic masculinity and misogyny–real male victims are collateral damage. Truly dismantling this trope is not about making women be sweet; it’s about taking female anger and female power seriously. That’s why I’m vehemently against bashing female characters for engaging in this trope. Especially because fandom bashing of this kind of character almost never involves actually showing her violence as being serious; instead, her violence is still ineffectual (can’t let Naruto be actually physically hurt by Sakura! he’s not a real man then!) but everyone in-universe suddenly hates her for it. This is not an improvement.
(As a last aside, this is not to say that all comedic violence is misogynistic; it’s quite possible to have slapstick that isn’t gendered like this. It’s just about this specific kind of female comedic violence and how it relies on a shared agreement between creator and audience that Golly the Wimmen Sure Are Cute When They’re Mad, What A Laugh.)
It may come down to this troubling reality, new research suggests: Work done by women simply isn’t valued as highly.
That sounds like a truism, but the academic work behind it helps explain the pay gap’s persistence even as the factors long thought to cause it have disappeared. Women, for example, are now better educated than men, have nearly as much work experience and are equally likely to pursue many high-paying careers. No longer can the gap be dismissed with pat observations that women outnumber men in lower-paying jobs like teaching and social work.
A
striking example is to be found in the field of recreation — working in
parks or leading camps — which went from predominantly male to female
from 1950 to 2000. Median hourly wages in this field declined 57
percentage points, accounting for the change in the value of the dollar,
according to a complex formula used by Professor Levanon. The job of
ticket agent also went from mainly male to female during this period,
and wages dropped 43 percentage points.
The
same thing happened when women in large numbers became designers (wages
fell 34 percentage points), housekeepers (wages fell 21 percentage
points) and biologists (wages fell 18 percentage points). The reverse
was true when a job attracted more men. Computer programming, for
instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when
male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige.
This is the stark reality. The pay gap exists not because of women’s “inability” but because they are viewed as inherently less valuable human beings.
People treat single moms like trash and single dads like some kind of a hero
Because the bar is so low for dads that the bare minimum of care is incredible but mums are just expected to be doing that work
Because single moms “made bad choices” and ended up “stuck with a kid” and it’s treated like a punishment that they deserve (as though another human being is a punishment). And the implication is that a dad has every right to choose not to take care of his children and if he does, it’s treated like he’s going above and beyond and making a huge sacrifice
Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.
Serve on a jury – because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.
Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.
Get an Ivy League education.
Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When
they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for
their MRS. Degee.
Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s
Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that
revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every
dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative
professional positions.
Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.
Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized
in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated
differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.
Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce
law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as
adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.
Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.
Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment.
Play college sports
Title IX of the Education
Amendments of protects people from discrimination based
on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal
financial assistance
It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports
Apply for men’s Jobs
The EEOC rules that
sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal. This ruling
is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to
apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.
This is why we needed feminism – this is why we know that feminism works
I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasn’t really sunk in what it is today’s GOP is actively trying to return to.
Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.
Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.
This shit was within living memory.
I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school.
Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.
When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, we’re not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. We’re talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.
I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s. This is what it was like:
When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls’ teams didn’t exist in high school, except at all-girls’ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders.
People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossible–those just weren’t realistic goals for a girl–the latter, especially, because you couldn’t trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all.
In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie…because, as he put it, “she was just his wife.” (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.)
Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above.
A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974.
The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no–a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure.
(Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.)
The male law students didn’t like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman.
My reaction was, “Thank you for proving my point…”
The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states–even in the early 1980s–a man could rape his daughter…and it was no worse than a misdemeanor.
Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as “cute.” The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasn’t it just adorable for her to try?
I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school–1978-79 and 1979-80–because, as the principal told me, “Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won’t use it.”
When I was in college–from 1980 to 1984–there were no womens’ studies. The idea hadn’t occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor–a man who had a doctorate in history–informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because…wait for it…womens’ brains were too small.
(He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.)
When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!!
…No, they WEREN’T kidding.
On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But I’m afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. I’ve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch.
I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was new–when the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadn’t even begun to come true. When “woman’s work” was a sneer–and an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, “Really, it’s a shame she’s not a boy.” That lack of feminism wasn’t all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasn’t entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable.
I wish I could make them feel what it was like…when grown men were called “men” and grown women were “girls.”
Know your history.
So this, too, is what they mean saying “make America great again” and/or the good old days.
REBLOG FOREVER.
I am 70. I remember all those things. I was a student nurse from 64 to 67 and we were not permitted to “finish” a bed bath on a male or insert a catheter in a male. Seeing male genitals might cause us “harm” or upset our delicate sensibilities. Imagine when we graduated and were “thrown” to the wolves. Imagine if you were a male patient who had to be the first to be “practiced” on by a graduate nurse. (Ha!) At the school I attended no student nurse could be married. Only one school in my city (Atlanta) would even admit married women and Male Nurses weren’t even thought of. What man would want to be a nurse when he could be a Doctor. In all my training I only remember 3 or 4 Women who were Doctor’s and a very few, (less than 5 or 6) female interns or residents (and this was a teaching hospital) and most of those were OB/Gyns and one was a pediatrician.
When I graduated and was going to get married I wanted to go on birth control pills. You needed to be on them for a least one cycle before they were effective. I won’t go into what hoops I had to jump through to get a prescription from my Dr. (a man, natch) but when i went to the drug store to get the prescription filled I ended up having to get my future husband to “accompany” me so the pharmacist “interview” him and see if it was okay with him for me to be on the pill.
Even when we went to get a marriage license I had to get my Father’s signature and we had to go before a Judge because I was not yet 21 (I was 20 and 9 months).
I could go on and on, getting a credit card in MY name, etc., but I will tell you that WE MUST RESIST.
The number of people I know who romanticize gender inequality is frankly terrifying. A world never existed in which the lives of women were simplified by benevolent men who saw to her every want and need. That was not a thing. A world never existed in which women were all ladies, men were all gentlemen, & everything was some great big cishet fairytale. Feminists aren’t a bunch of upstarts who want to destroy a perfectly wholesome and non-harmful system. Just…look at history. Look at the posts above. We. Must. Resist..
About 8: The State of New York only added No-Fault Divorce as an option in 2010 (!!!)
I want to repeat here.
This is what they mean, when they say “Old-fashioned values”
When conservatives start waxing lyrical about the ‘good old days’, this is what they mean. They are fully aware how much things blew for women, and they would like to return to that.
My mother was born in 1950, and she went to a trade school for drafting in her early twenties. It wasn’t a real college because they hadn’t yet opened their doors to women.
My mother recounts the horror of being the only woman in the draftsman course, painstakingly doing her work and having the male teacher take it, along with all the other work from the male students and dangle hers, shaking it, and saying “who wants to grade [My mother]’s work???”
Even if she had right answers, she would fail because the boys who corrected her paper would mark her answers as incorrect.
wupacing 