Feminism

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that people recommended lower salaries for the exact same occupation when it was presented as being made up of mostly women rather than mostly men.

"Women still earn 85 cents for every dollar men earn," said Catherine Taylor, an associate professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara and lead author of the study. While some of that gap is linked to women working in lower-paying occupations, Taylor said her team's research asked a different question: Are some occupations paid less because women are in them?

Attorneys for Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman on trial for strangling her three young children in 2023, argued before a jury Tuesday that Clancy should not be held criminally responsible for their deaths. The 35-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, they said, had been experiencing postpartum psychosis, a rare and dangerous medical condition that alters a person’s perception of reality after childbirth.

Harris, who works in IT, tried to white-knuckle these symptoms until one night in October 2022 when, while she was making pasta for dinner, her heart started pounding. Her father had died young of a heart attack; she feared she was having one too. At 39 she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, her first indication of any heart condition, prescribed a cocktail of drugs and eventually implanted with a pacemaker. She was baffled. In a few years she’d gone from a healthy, happy woman to someone in a perpetual state of distress. Then her periods went haywire, lasting for weeks at a time. She began to suspect all those disparate symptoms weren’t random. When she typed them into Google, the results suggested she was in perimenopause. “It all came together,” she says.

Harris’ doctors disagreed. She was too young, they said. A doctor prescribed birth control to regulate her cycle and sent her on her way. So Harris did what many frustrated patients do and turned back to the internet for ideas. She sought solace from Reddit and advice from ChatGPT. She drank more water, ate less sugar and went for walks. She got a prescription for a compounded hormone therapy cream. In the course of about a decade, she forked over thousands of dollars, including for all kinds of supplements that popped up in ads on Instagram and TikTok: black cohosh, ashwagandha, something called Steel-Libido. “If I saw it, I tried it,” she says. If only any of it had worked.

Although women around the world live longer than men, they spend more of their years in poor health. This is partly because of differences in biology and partly because doctors and scientists just don’t know enough about how a woman’s body works, especially as it ages. That includes many medical specialists: A 2023 survey found that roughly 70% of responding OB-GYN residency programs in the US didn’t include any menopause curriculum.

“I was nothing but happy (after the divorce). That was my only emotion,” she said. “I was so happy I wanted to run around all over the place.”

Stories like hers are increasingly common around the world as the number of “gray divorces” – splits among couples aged 50 and older – rises each year. The trend has been seen in countries like the United States and elsewhere, but takes on particular significance in Asia, where people generally live longer.

Many places like South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China are battling demographic crises as birth rates fall and elderly populations swell.

The surge in gray divorces is also often driven by women – who have long faced restrictive gender norms in conservative Asian societies, as well as legal, financial, and social barriers to seeking divorce. That’s now changing; in Japan, for instance, among couples splitting after decades of marriage, twice as many women as men filed for divorce in 2024.

The Epstein files confirmed what many already knew: older men grooming and sexually abusing underage girls is not rare, not an anomaly, and not always recognized until it is too late.

When a teenage girl begins sneaking out, withdrawing from her family, keeping secrets, or spending time with an older man, adults often see rebellion. Sometimes they call her “fast.” Sometimes they assume she’s acting out or growing up too quickly. But those same behaviors can also be signs that an adult is grooming her for abuse.

Eight years ago I was tasked with writing blog posts for a tech event with little writing experience under my belt, so I was given an editor. Nothing changed my writing style more than she, who pointed out all the ways (she asserted) women hedge and weaken their language to minimize the impact of their words. It's a learned response, she told me, to not appear aggressive or unagreeable.

I still flinch every time I use the word "just," even if it just makes sense.

What do you think?

South Dakota is having trouble enforcing a law banning advertising about abortion pills. On July 17, 2026, less than three weeks after the ban took effect on July 1, U.S. District Judge Camela C. Theeler issued an injunction blocking its enforcement.

She ruled that the ban likely is unconstitutional in response to a lawsuit filed by Mayday Health, a nonprofit based in New York. Mayday’s website provides information about abortion pills, with links that can help women find a telemedicine provider.

Mayday wanted to promote its website in South Dakota, including by posting signs at gas stations that asked: “Pregnant? Don’t Want to Be?” and encouraged people to “learn more” by going to its website. Fearing prosecution for having posted these signs, Mayday sued. It contended that South Dakota’s advertising ban censored truthful information and violated its First Amendment free speech rights.

As an expert on reproductive rights and First Amendment law who has argued before the Supreme Court, I think this case illustrates how the battle over abortion, which used to revolve around whether it should be legal everywhere in the U.S., now focuses on pills and telemedicine. It also shows how the First Amendment can limit a state’s ability to restrict health information just because its leaders disapprove of it.

Continued in article.

The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) has taken a step beyond most other women’s sports leagues by requiring genetic sex testing for female athletes.

Despite being targeted at transgender women, this policy has the greatest potential to impact intersex cisgender women — especially because many of them don’t know they are intersex. There are no known trans women playing on the WTA Tour. But there are plenty of cis women who will now have to go through medical tests to prove their eligibility.

#EndEyeCheck is a new rape survivor-led campaign building awareness, community, and changing the laws that allow men to get away with drugging and raping their wives and partners. We are tackling online content as part of the campaign and starting to collect statistics of drug facilitated rape.

Our names are Zoe Watts and Amanda Stanhope. We are two survivors that were brought together with the support of ITV News for the first time in London.

ITV News has launched an anonymous survey of survivors as a part of their investigation into the scale of sexual assault and rape carried out by a partner against women who were incapacitated or unconscious.

If you are a survivor, please join us in filling out the survey and helping us develop statistics to support our advocacy work. This is a voluntary survey and we encourage survivors to connect with the Zoe or Amanda on Instagram or by e-mail.

If you need extra protection, we recommend using private/incognito mode on your web browser a personal device that isn’t shared or monitored. Please only continue if you are in a safe space to do so.

Meeropol resists making Trump the focus of her film, having found a much more interesting main character in E. Jean Carroll herself. Dubbed “feminism’s answer to Hunter S. Thompson” by The New York Times, she built a career as a gonzo journalist, someone who excelled at entering strange social situations and bending the goings-on around her like gravity around a star, then writing about it. Her bubbly, acerbic wit shines through in every article she writes.

Influenced by the likes of Dear Abby and Ask Ann Landers, Carroll had wanted to be an advice columnist all her life. When she got a foothold selling stories to magazines, that childhood dream could finally blossom. From stories about Fran Lebowitz camping to tales of college fraternities, she says in the doc, she became “the go-to person at Esquire to cover bizarre sexual [and] gender stories.”

As the conscience for generations of American women, Carroll had a front-row seat to the country’s cultural metamorphosis. “If you ever want to know the pulse of America, read an advice column,” she says. “It’s not necessarily in the answers — it’s in the question.” Carroll noticed recurring anxieties among her readers about sexism in the workplace and men’s pushback to the feminist movement.

Mythologies across the world abound with stories that center heroes. Be it Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Mahabharata or the Shahnameh, great epics highlight the exploits and adventures of men, the women in their lives often relegated to the sidelines, their roles limited to that of dutiful wives, villains, or victims.

This episode of the Maintenance Phase podcast explores the medical history of vibrators. Spoiler: It debunks the popular mythology that vibrators first originated as a tool to treat female “hysteria.”

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/63404866

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has published official guidelines that address how to showcase women athletes without overly sexualizing the camera angles.

The EBU describes itself as the world’s leading alliance of public service media, with 113 member organizations in 56 countries, with an additional 31 associates in Asia, Africa, Australasia and the Americas.

The guide, titled Raising the Bar, focuses on women’s track and field and includes multiple examples of how to both position cameras while at the same time avoiding certain compromising angles.

During the 2024 Olympics, the CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services specifically called on camera operators to film both male and female athletes the same way to avoid “stereotypes and sexism” creeping into television coverage of the sporting event. This guide, which gives specific examples, feels like a natural extension of that broad call.

Recently found this long form podcast between two hosts, Katie and Caro, where they discuss and dissect various individuals and books representing larger issues in USA and the world. Their discussions are very in depth, and they often read entire books for each episode and scourge the sources supposedly sited within or look through entire media channels or read government documents.

A thing that they have talked about in several episodes, and something I have long longed to hear discussed, is the offensive behavior of women being given far more negative attention than the same behavior in men.

Like in their episode on the girlboss, they note how women who wants to rise in the corporate world, and media portraying them, are especially vilified compared to men who are far more numerous in this category. And note, they are both critical of capitalism, and yet they come out in the other end with a better view of the stereotypical girl boss.

Their episode on how Epstein was allowed to get away with it, also notes how he was seen as a savvy success for lying on his resume. On the flip side, many of his sex trafficking victims were struck down in court, for lying on their resume, trying to cover up their years of abuse.

In this episode, they investigate a book on the supposed phenomena of men falling downwards in society, and contrasts it with the homoerotic smut book Heated Rivalry. Trust me, it makes sense in the end.

So all around a five star recommendation from here.

In a cross-sectional study of Youth Risk Behavior Survey data from 338 324 students from 2017 to 2023, total abortion bans were associated with a statistically significant 4.3–percentage point increase in suicidal ideation among female students. No significant differences were observed among male students.

As the current administration and pro-natalist groups continue to panic about women delaying motherhood, we must reject the “alarming fertility statistics.” If women choose to have children, that decision should be guided by their own goals, circumstances, and desires, not by pressures to solve a manufactured problem.

At the end of the day, supporting families means creating conditions in which people can make reproductive decisions freely. The solution to declining birth rates is not limiting women’s choices, but ensuring they have the resources and support needed to build the lives and families they want.

Since making headlines in June 1993 for severing her then-husband’s penis, Lorena Bobbitt has used her platform to advocate for domestic violence survivors

https://archive.ph/lWbc6

Lindy West has unwittingly written the obituary for an era.

Lindy west is the most successful feminist writer of her (and my) generation. In her pomp at Jezebel, she mastered both viral takedowns—sorry, Love Actually—and confessional writing. She embraced adjectives that were meant to demean her: loud, fat, shrill. When Lindy shouted, women listened.

That background is what makes the publication of her new memoir, Adult Braces, such a cultural moment. Adult Braces is many things: a paean to the varied landscapes of America, an advert for #vanlife, a reminder to be grateful that your partner hasn’t talked you into a throuple with a much thinner woman. It is also the tombstone for Millennial Feminism—that swirling brew of Media Twitter, blog snark, the Great Awokening, whaling on Lena Dunham, fat positivity, and boring straight people identifying as queer through accounting tricks. To read Lindy West is to gaze backwards in time, to an era when it was acceptable to write “welp!” in copy.