Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged harassment

Rss Feed Group items tagged

jlessner

Making Egypt's Streets Safe for Women - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • making it far less likely that she will encounter the verbal abuse or physical and sexual assaults that women have come to expect on Cairo’s streets.
  • “I am a woman from Egypt, so I face harassment in the streets daily,” Ms. Helal, 29, said in a phone interview this week.
  • She has to be acutely aware of her surroundings every time she photographs in a crowd in public, constantly evaluate her safety and make sure there is a clear escape route in case she is attacked. While public harassment of women has been commonplace, it was not until an incident four years ago, while covering a peaceful protest on International Women’s Day, that she started documenting these encounters. It was a few months after the start of the Arab Spring in Egypt, and women went to Tahrir Square to hand out flowers in support of women’s rights.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “A group of men came and told them they should not be there and should be home taking care of their families,” Ms. Helal said. “After that they attacked the women and harassed them.
  • “I decided to do this story because I don’t feel safe on the streets walking in front of a man,” she said. “There are no other photographers interested in working on these subjects here, and it is important to speak about these issues.”
  • She interviewed many women who said they had been attacked in Egypt, some of whom were reluctant to speak out, much less be photographed
Javier E

What To Make Of Ferguson? Ctd « The Dish - 0 views

  • How can you say Wilson had “no need” to shoot Brown that many times? The reason law enforcement went to high-capacity handguns and dumped the six shooters is because of the ability of people to withstand multiple gunshot wounds and continue fighting (or shooting.) The catalyst for this approach was the 1986 Miami shooting in which to FBI officers were killed AFTER they had shot two bank robbers multiple times. The robbers eventually died of their wounds, but in the meantime, they kept firing and killed the agents. Officer Wilson adhered to his training: shoot until the suspect is on the ground.
  • Mike Brown is to the Left what Benghazi is to the Right. Preconceptions are everything. Facts don’t matter. Logic doesn’t matter. There’s a narrative of racist-white-cop-kills-harmless-black-kid, and no matter what uncomfortable fact intrudes, like that so many “witnesses” admitted they didn’t actually see what they told the media they saw, the narrative must go on. Because racism.
  • Maybe lethal force wasn’t necessary, but science has proven that Brown turned and moved back toward Wilson (at least 20 feet) and was not shot from behind. There was undeniably an altercation at/inside the police cruiser. Does the fact that one man is alive and one is dead skew the way those facts are interpreted? Absolutely. But there exist certain physical certainties that strongly suggest this was not cold-blooded murder.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • I agree entirely that this should have gone to trial and realize that, statistically, nearly everything reviewed by a grand jury does. I agree that the fact Wilson will never even face charges is a mark of shame on the legal system. But I don’t get the sense that the people who are furious about this, whatever their race, are clamoring for a trial they’ll never see; it seems to me they’re clamoring for a conviction they feel they’ve been cheated out of.
  • Balko’s article makes clear that this is not an environment where the police are protecting and serving but instead harassing and self-serving. I am in no way justifying assailing a police officer (or anyone for that matter), verbally or physically, but you are not a young Black man living in what is still ostensibly the South and facing harassment for just being. I challenge you to invite Black males to tell you their stories of police harassment. How many times they have been detained, cuffed, kicked and threatened with death because they fit a profile, looked suspicious or were just somewhere some cop didn’t think they belonged? Yes, this is in America.
  • there is an interminable, sometimes slight, sometimes massive burden that comes with Blackness that you seem wholly oblivious to. That 12 year old that was shot in Cleveland was sitting on a swing playing with a fake gun. Two things happened due purely to his Blackness: police were called and he was murdered. Full stop. The Black man shot in the stairwell of his building in NYC for just existing while Black because a cop got scared. And that’s just since Monday.
  • Clive Bundy assails and threatens federal officers and gets invited on Fox News. Eric Frein plans and carries out an attack on state trooper barracks, killing one and seriously wounding another – again brought in alive. Ted Nugent scares the shit out of me with his racism, misogyny, anti-government and gun-humping ways, but yet he’s a hero to many White people and no one seems to have shot him yet either. White people have feared, reviled and vilified Blackness since they first laid eyes upon us. The codification and justification of our enslavement, disenfranchisement and murder is beyond primordial; it is part and parcel of what has made America and the Western world. Ferguson is just another eruption in this racist legacy and reality.
  • on of your readers claimed that, at most, Brown was guilty of petit theft, which is a misdemeanor. This is incorrect. Brown not only stole from the convenience store, he assaulted the business owner who tried to stop him from stealing. This assault escalated Brown’s theft to a strong-arm robbery, which is a second-degree felony in the State of Missouri. And it was Brown’s commission of this felony that began the chain of events that led to his death. He had nobody but himself to blame for that – not Officer Wilson, not the prosecutor, and not racism.
runlai_jiang

China professor accused in #MeToo campaign is sacked - BBC News - 0 views

  • A Chinese university has fired a professor accused of sexual misconduct, after a former student named him in a #MeToo campaign.
  • The former student, Luo Xixi, shared her story on China's version of Twitter, Weibo, earlier this month.Her account went viral and was seen as China's first widely-shared #MeToo moment.Ms Luo, who now lives in the US, previously told the BBC that the #MeToo movement in the West had given her "a lot of courage". In her post, she said that Mr Chen had tried to force himself on her 13 years ago, after luring her to his sister's house. He later relented after she burst into tears, she said.
  • Her post on Weibo gained more than three million views within a day and triggered a heated debate online about sexual harassment in China.Late on Thursday, Beihang University announced that Mr Chen had been found to have "seriously violated" the school's code of conduct.Mr Chen had been removed as vice-president of the university's graduate school and had his teaching credentials revoked, it said.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Although Ms Luo's post was widely read and sparked a discussion about sexual harassment, observers say the #MeToo campaign has not been as prominent on Chinese social media, compared to many other countries.Feminist activists have cited a lack of proper mechanisms to deal with sexual harassment, fears of victim-blaming, internet censorship and the detention of five prominent feminists in 2015 as potential reasons for this.
izzerios

The real message of Fox's treatment of Bill O'Reilly (opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views

shared by izzerios on 19 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • On Wednesday, Fox News announced that Bill O'Reilly is fired.
  • O'Reilly and the network have paid out about $13 million to settle claims of "sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior"
  • It's far too late to salvage the network's reputation by removing "The O'Reilly Factor" host now
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The fact is O'Reilly's program was number one in cable news. It generated more viewers and more revenue than any other program in the category, bringing in $126 million in advertising in 2015. So, Fox chose to prioritize money over morality.
  • It was especially urgent for Fox to address the problem forcefully, because it already had a reputation for tolerating sexual harassment.
  • Soon, more than 50 companies under pressure from consumers announced they wouldn't advertise on the show.
  • Finally, after nearly three weeks of self-inflicted negative media coverage, Fox realized it needed to stanch the bleeding and announced that O'Reilly is out.
  • Yes, it does -- to the other men at Fox: if you make enough money for the network, it will go to extraordinary lengths to enable you to behave badly.
krystalxu

Lawyer: Conyers won't resign House seat, did not harass women - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • "If everybody that was facing 'allegations' -- including the President, members of the House and Senate -- resigned, we'd have a lot of unemployed people walking around."
  • In the report, Sloan alleged that Conyers had harassed and verbally abused her and that her appeals for help from congressional leadership were ignored.
  • it is fundamentally incongruous with her statements," he said.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Court documents also revealed this week that another former staffer alleged that Conyers had sexually harassed her in 2015 and 2016.
carolinehayter

Cuomo faces most serious allegation yet as aide says governor groped her | Andrew Cuomo... - 0 views

  • An aide to Andrew Cuomo says the New York governor groped her in the governor’s residence, marking the most serious allegation among those made by a series of women against the embattled Democrat, according to a report published in a newspaper Wednesday.
  • reported that the woman, who was not identified, was alone with Cuomo when he closed the door, reached under her shirt and fondled her. The newspaper’s reporting is based on an unidentified source with direct knowledge of the woman’s accusation.
  • The three-term governor faces harassment allegations from five other women
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “The governor’s sexual harassment, which Charlotte Bennett reported, was buried by his aides and never properly investigated,” Katz’s statement said. “Because of their enablement, another young woman was left in harm’s way.”
  • The woman whose account was reported by the Times Union also indicated that Cuomo had touched her and made flirtatious comments on multiple occasions.
  • In it, he denied ever touching a woman inappropriately. The aide subsequently became emotional, and told a female supervisor who approached her about her encounters with the governor. At least one supervisor reported the allegation to an attorney in the governor’s office Monday, the newspaper reported.
  • The state attorney general, Letitia James, has put together an investigative team to probe Cuomo’s workplace conduct. The governor has called on lawmakers and the public to await the results of that investigation. Federal investigators are also scrutinizing how his administration handled data concerning Covid-19 outbreaks at nursing homes.
  • Cuomo has repeatedly maintained he won’t resign.
  • The Republican assembly member Mike Lawler on Twitter called Cuomo “a sexual predator” who should be charged.
lmunch

Gregg Jarrett: Open Cuomo criminal investigation - latest accusation suggests more than... - 0 views

  • If it is true that Gov. Andrew Cuomo reached under the blouse of a female employee and groped her without consent it would constitute a crime under New York law. Unwanted sexual contact falls under the broad category of sexual assault. 
  • The appalling complaint by a sixth accuser, as reported by the Albany Times Union, suggests not only a pattern of sexual harassment by the governor but a level of offensive conduct that appears to have crossed the legal line into felonious behavior.   
  • Yet, another of Cuomo’s accusers, 25-year-old Charlotte Bennett, has said he used the exact same ploy on her. Through her attorney, she issued a statement saying the governor asked her to come to his office in the Capitol one weekend to help him with his cellphone. Once alone, she claims that he questioned her about her sex life and propositioned her.   
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The accounts of a half a dozen accusers who have bravely stepped forward paint a vivid picture of a governor as a sexual predator who exploited his power to prey on women. His despicable response is to blame the victims – it’s their fault for "misinterpreting it as unwanted flirtation." Cuomo claimed he was just "being playful." At one point, he even blamed his father, as if learned behavior somehow makes it OK. Assaulting a woman is no more permissible because someone else did it.   
  • Allegations, of course, are not proof of guilt. The governor is entitled to the due process that he now demands, even though he never afforded it to anyone else. When issues of sexual harassment or assault were raised against others, he promptly pronounced them guilty without due process. For example, Cuomo called the accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh presumptively true, all but calling him a rapist. By his own standard, the governor should presume himself guilty.   
edencottone

Biden says Cuomo should resign if investigation confirms sexual harassment allegations ... - 0 views

  • President Joe Biden said in an interview aired Tuesday that Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo should resign if an investigation confirms the allegations of sexual harassment against him.
  • he'll probably end up being prosecuted, too," Biden said.
  • "Takes a lot of courage to come forward," he said. "So, the presumption is they should be taken seriously. And it should be investigated. And that's what's underway now."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The White House's posture is a notable break from the calls for resignation from the majority of the New York congressional delegation, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
  • Democratic leaders in the state Legislature are content to wait for a pair of investigations, one tasked by state Attorney General Letitia James and the other about to be empaneled by Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, to run their course before formally beginning the impeachment process.
  • The investigation into the sexual harassment allegations is being led by attorneys Joon Kim, a former prosecutor with the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, and Anne Clark, an employment discrimination attorney.
anonymous

Can Biden Stay on the Sidelines of the Andrew Cuomo Saga? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • President Biden has made only a passing comment on the crises that have engulfed Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, and he seems to be hoping to avoid getting pulled in any further.
  • Mr. Biden is one of the very few people in the nation with the potential to prevent a protracted standoff between an increasingly isolated Mr. Cuomo and the rest of the Democratic Party.
  • The governor and his allies have urged people to wait for the results of the investigations to buy time, in the hope of stabilizing Mr. Cuomo’s support.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • But a prolonged period of intraparty sparring over Mr. Cuomo’s future could be problematic for Mr. Biden. It threatens to distract from his early initiatives, including mass vaccination efforts and his party’s imperative to sell the public on the nearly $2 trillion stimulus package Mr. Biden signed into law last week.
  • On Tuesday, the White House will hold its weekly call on the coronavirus with the National Governors Association, which Mr. Cuomo typically leads as chairman of the group. Ms. Psaki said she expected Mr. Cuomo would join the call, adding, “We’ll leave that up to him.”
  • Still, the governor has flatly refused to contemplate resignation while questioning the motives of the women who have accused him of sexual harassment, invoking “cancel culture,”
  • During the presidential campaign, Mr. Biden successfully avoided getting dragged into controversies that didn’t directly relate to him. But the bullying behavior Mr. Cuomo is accused of is contrary to the standard Mr. Biden has set for his own White House.
  • When Mr. Biden in 2020 was accused of sexual assault by a woman who had worked in his Senate office decades earlier, he denied her allegation but did not impugn her motives. Mr. Cuomo has questioned the motivations of some of his accusers.
  • Still, support for Mr. Cuomo has eroded significantly from the highs of his coronavirus press briefings in the spring of 2020 — when he hit 71 percent approval — and even from February, when his approval among all voters was 56 percent in a Siena College poll.
  • “The state is about to be flush with Covid cash,” Mr. Sellers said. “Better days ahead for constituents. Hang on until you become everyone’s favorite bank.”
  • Some members of Congress and their aides were put off by a statement that the former senior member of the delegation, Representative Nita Lowey, of Westchester, had made in defense of Mr. Cuomo, according to a person familiar with the matter. The members had the sense that Ms. Lowey was inappropriately “instrumentalized” as a shield for Mr. Cuomo, the person said, adding that while it wasn’t the precipitating event for other members to speak out last Friday, it had left an impression.
  • Mr. Biden’s fondness for Mr. Cuomo does not necessarily extend to the staff level. The governor’s sharp-elbowed political operation has jabbed at many people in his path over the years.
nrashkind

ACLU sues Minnesota police, alleging harassment of journalists at protests - Reuters - 0 views

  • The American Civil Liberties Union has accused Minnesota law enforcement of wrongly arresting, injuring and harassing journalists covering unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, in Minneapolis police custody.
  • In a lawsuit, filed on behalf of journalists in U.S. District Court in Minnesota on Wednesday, the ACLU accuses the Minneapolis Police Department and Minnesota State Patrol of shooting journalists in the face with rubber bullets, arresting reporters and photographers without cause, and threatening them at gunpoint.
  • A Minneapolis police spokesman directed inquiries about the suit to City Attorney Erik Nilsson.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • We are facing a full-scale assault on the First Amendment freedom of the press,” said Brian Hauss, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “We will not let these official abuses go unanswered.”
  • The class-action lawsuit was filed with Minneapolis freelance journalist Jared Goyette as the lead plaintiff.
  • WCCO, CNN and the Los Angeles Times could not be reached immediately for comment.
  • The complaint also details two incidents involving Reuters journalists, although the news agency and its employees are not plaintiffs.
  • Minnesota on Wednesday increased to second-degree murder the charge against a fired Minneapolis police officer in the death of George Floyd, and leveled charges against three other sacked officers.
Javier E

Steven Pinker's five-point plan to save Harvard from itself - 0 views

  • The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context. Gay was excoriated not only by conservative politicians but by liberal alumni, donors, and faculty, by pundits across the spectrum, even by a White House spokesperson and by the second gentleman of the United States. Petitions demanding her resignation have circulated in Congress, X, and factions of the Harvard community, and at the time of this writing, a prediction market is posting 1.2:1 odds that she will be ousted by the end of the year.
  • I don’t believe that firing Gay is the appropriate response to the fiasco. It wasn’t just Gay who fumbled the genocide question but two other elite university presidents — Sally Kornbluth of MIT (my former employer) and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned following her testimony — which suggests that the problem with Gay’s performance betrays a deeper problem in American universities.
  • Gay interpreted the question not at face value but as pertaining to whether Harvard students who had brandished slogans like “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea,” which many people interpret as tantamount to a call for genocide, could be prosecuted under Harvard’s policies. Though the slogans are simplistic and reprehensible, they are not calls for genocide in so many words. So even if a university could punish direct calls for genocide as some form of harassment, it might justifiably choose not to prosecute students for an interpretation of their words they did not intend.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Nor can a university with a commitment to academic freedom prohibit all calls for political violence. That would require it to punish, say, students who express support for the invasion of Gaza knowing that it must result in the deaths of thousands of civilians. Thus Gay was correct in saying that students’ political slogans are not punishable by Harvard’s rules on harassment and bullying unless they cross over into intimidation, personal threats, or direct incitement of violence.
  • Gay was correct yet again in replying to Stefanik’s insistent demand, “What action has been taken against students who are harassing Jews on campus?” by noting that no action can be taken until an investigation has been completed. Harvard should not mete out summary justice like the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland”: Sentence first, verdict afterward.
  • The real problem with Gay’s testimony was that she could not clearly and credibly invoke those principles because they either have never been explicitly adopted by Harvard or they have been flagrantly flouted in the past (as Stefanik was quick to point out)
  • Harvard has persecuted scholars who said there are two sexes, or who signed an amicus brief taking the conservative side in a Supreme Court deliberation. It has retracted acceptances from students who were outed by jealous peers for having used racist trash talk on social media when they were teens. Harvard’s subzero FIRE rating reveals many other punishments of politically incorrect peccadillos.
  • Institutional neutrality. A university does not need a foreign policy, and it does not need to issue pronouncements on the controversies and events of the day. It is a forum for debate, not a protagonist in debates. When a university takes a public stand, it either puts words in the mouths of faculty and students who can speak for themselves or unfairly pits them against their own employer.
  • In the wake of this debacle, the natural defense mechanism of a modern university is to expand the category of forbidden speech to include antisemitism (and as night follows day, Islamophobia). Bad idea
  • Deplorable speech should be refuted, not criminalized. Outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn’t want to hear “hate speech.” Even the apparent no-brainer of prohibiting calls for genocide would backfire. Trans activists would say that opponents of transgender women in women’s sports were advocating genocide, and Palestinian activists would use the ban to keep Israeli officials from speaking on campus.
  • For universities to have a leg to stand on when they try to stand on principle, they must embark on a long-term plan to undo the damage they have inflicted on themselves. This requires five commitments.
  • Free speech. Universities should adopt a clear and conspicuous policy on academic freedom. It might start with the First Amendment, which binds public universities and which has been refined over the decades with carefully justified exceptions.
  • Since universities are institutions with a mission of research and education, they are also entitled to controls on speech that are necessary to fulfill that mission. These include standards of quality and relevance: You can’t teach anything you want at Harvard, just like you can’t publish anything you want in The Boston Globe. And it includes an environment conducive to learning.
  • So for the president of Harvard to suddenly come out as a born-again free-speech absolutist, disapproving of what genocidaires say but defending to the death their right to say it, struck onlookers as disingenuous or worse.
  • The events of this autumn also show that university pronouncements are an invitation to rancor and distraction. Inevitably there will be constituencies who feel a statement is too strong, too weak, too late, or wrongheaded.
  • Nonviolence.
  • Universities should not indulge acts of vandalism, trespassing, and extortion. Free speech does not include a heckler’s veto, which blocks the speech of others. These goon tactics also violate the deepest value of a university, which is that opinions are advanced by reason and persuasion, not by force
  • Viewpoint diversity. Universities have become intellectual and political monocultures. Seventy-seven percent of the professors in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences describe themselves as liberal, and fewer than 3 percent as conservative. Many university programs have been monopolized by extreme ideologies, such as the conspiracy theory that the world’s problems are the deliberate designs of a white heterosexual male colonialist oppressor class.
  • Vast regions in the landscape of ideas are no-go zones, and dissenting ideas are greeted with incomprehension, outrage, and censorship.
  • The entrenchment of dogma is a hazard of policies that hire and promote on the say-so of faculty backed by peer evaluations. Though intended to protect departments from outside interference, the policies can devolve into a network of like-minded cronies conferring prestige on each other. Universities should incentivize departments to diversify their ideologies, and they should find ways of opening up their programs to sanity checks from the world outside.
  • Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.
  • An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.
  • Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.
  • A fivefold way of free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity, and DEI disempowerment will not be a quick fix for universities. But it’s necessary to reverse their tanking credibility and better than the alternatives of firing the coach or deepening the hole they have dug for themselves.
criscimagnael

The Fall of the 'Sun King' of French TV, and the Myth of Seduction - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, known as a great seducer, has been accused by more than 20 women of rape, sexual assault and harassment in France’s belated #MeToo reckoning.
  • France’s most trusted anchorman for decades, he used to draw millions in an evening news program that some likened to a religious communion. In an earlier time, he embodied an ideal of the French male — at ease with himself, a TV journalist and man of letters, a husband and a father who was also, unabashedly, a great seducer of women.
  • Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, nicknamed the Sun King of French TV,
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Angered, nearly 20 women appeared together this month in a TV studio for Mediapart, France’s leading investigative news site, with some recounting rapes or assaults that lasted minutes, carried out with barely a few words.
  • “He was called a Don Juan for years,” said Hélène Devynck, 55, a journalist who has accused Mr. Poivre d’Arvor of raping her at his home when she worked as one of his assistants in the early 1990s.
  • “His ego is destroying him,” said Cécile Delarue, 43, a journalist who has accused Mr. Poivre d’Arvor of engaging in sexual harassment when she worked with him two decades ago.
  • Mr. Poivre d’Arvor declined an interview request through Mr. Naepels, who said that at least one more woman could be included in the defamation suit.
  • According to the French news media, Mr. Poivre d’Arvor has been married for 50 years to the same woman, who has not commented publicly on the accusations.
  • On air, he appealed especially to a target audience of women under 50, Mr. Lévrier said.
  • He regularly invited young women to watch his live broadcasts before leading them to his private office, where several of the women say he assaulted them. He also pressed young female employees for sex, or sexually harassed them, according to former employees, including Ms. Devynck, the former assistant.
  • “I knew that, at the time, if I complained, he was the seducer and so I was the whore — I couldn’t say anything because of his power and the support he had,” said Ms. Devynck, who went on to a successful career at other channels.
  • “I’m of a generation that was raised with the idea that women and men were equal, and that it was through work that I would gain freedom — my mother told me often,” Ms. Delarue said. “But this man just saw me as a fresh piece of meat.”
  • A famous letter written by Catherine Deneuve and other prominent Frenchwomen denounced #MeToo as “puritanism” and defended “the freedom to importune” as part of French “gallantry.” Traditional French feminism — and its fierce rejection of #MeToo as an American aberration — was a “trap” that led women to believe that they could be free without worrying about sexual violence, Ms. Devynck said.
  • “His image was so powerful that people kept saying it’s not possible, he’s such a seducer, she should have been flattered,” Ms. de Blasi, 33, recalled. “I kept reading, ‘French charm, gallantry and seduction,’ when it wasn’t about that at all.”
  • “Little jokes about not wearing a décolleté, makeup or a skirt,” she recalled.
  • The great seducer is “such a part of our collective imagination,” she said. “And the problem is that part of French society still believes in it, or at least believed in it.”
criscimagnael

India's Supreme Court Orders Police to Respect Prostitutes' Rights - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Though sex work is legal in the country, those who practice it often endure harassment and abuse. The justices urged the authorities to employ a more nuanced and humane approach.
  • Zareena was inside her room at a brothel in Mumbai’s vast red-light district when police officers burst in, she recalled recently, looking for a woman thought to be a victim of sex trafficking.
  • But, she said, once there, she herself was detained, despite having committed no crime. She spent that night in 2019, like so many others over the years, inside a lockup.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Though prostitution is legal in India, those who practice it have long faced marginalization, violence and police harassment. A panel set up in 2011 to examine these issues has made a series of recommendations over the past six years, but none have been written into law.
  • In that order, the court identified two categories: consenting adults voluntarily employed in prostitution; and minors, trafficking victims and those eager to leave the industry.
  • “It is as if they are a class whose rights are not recognized,” the court added. “The police and other law enforcement agencies should be sensitized to the rights of sex workers who also enjoy all basic human rights and other rights guaranteed in the Constitution to all citizens. Police should treat all sex workers with dignity.”
  • The court also clarified that prostitutes should not be separated from their children.
  • India is among a small handful of countries, including Canada and New Zealand, that have instituted legal protections for prostitutes. Though performing sexual acts for money itself is legal, running a brothel and other related activities, like soliciting and pimping, are not.
  • Rights groups estimate that India has about 900,000 prostitutes. Most, they say, have been pushed into the work by crushing poverty and sometimes forced into it by human traffickers. Others have chosen it over other informal employment opportunities, researchers have found.
  • The Supreme Court order addresses something that the United Nations and other institutions have stressed: decriminalizing sex work is, alone, not enough to improve conditions for workers in the industry. Governments need to lift other impediments to ensure equal treatment.
  • Zareena, 55, who asked that only her first name be used because of the stigma attached to her profession, said that she had been trafficked into the sex trade at the age of 12 but that, as an adult, she chose to continue the work to support her four children.
  • When she heard about the court’s directive on Friday, she said, she was hopeful it would free prostitutes from the fear of being dragged into police stations, where they were often harassed for bribes.
Javier E

Germany's Sexism Provokes Backlash - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Based on the global reputation and overall popularity of Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany appears from the outside to be a country where equality between men and women has long been established.
  • In a country where mothers who are deemed to spend more time focusing on their jobs than their children are labeled Rabenmütter, or raven mothers, and where the definitive tome of the German language, Duden, only this year considered adding a feminine term to refer to a woman who heads a board of directors, “Vorständin,” many view a public debate on sexism as long overdue.
  • Yet thousands of German women have taken to social media in recent days to tell a radically different story — one of daily sexis
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • According to ministry for women and families, 58 percent of German women say they have been subject to sexual harassment, with more than 42 percent of the cases happening on the job
davisem

Sexual harassment: How to make science safer for women - 0 views

shared by davisem on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  •  
    Put your head down and don't say anything. Focus on the science. Katey Alatalo heard it as a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, where colleagues warned of certain professors and senior scientists you did not want to be alone with "behind closed doors."
draneka

Europe's Far Right: Female Leaders Wooing Female Voters - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Gender is a useful wedge, though, when it comes to highlighting what has become one of their main planks: a critique of immigration, particularly from the Muslim world. The European far right has long seized on the hijab as a symbol of patriarchy; more recently it has said that attacks on gays and women in Muslim enclaves are evidence of the Islamic threat to European values.
  • “They defend ‘our’ women against harassment by foreigners — strangers, migrants, Muslim men,” says Ms. Wodak, the author of “The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean.” “However, they never spoke out against sexual harassment before.”
  • Female leaders in Europe span the ideological spectrum. Two of the Continent’s most powerful leaders, Ms. Merkel of Germany and Theresa May of Britain, are on opposite sides of Britain’s plan to leave the European Union.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Sometimes, gender can make a difference in who wins
knudsenlu

Abuse isn't romantic. So why the panic that feminists are killing eros? | Jessica Valen... - 0 views

  • Catherine Deneuve and others have publicly worried that the campaign to end sexual harassment has gone too far but the truth is there is no war on romance
  • The #MeToo backlash is here, and it’s very worried about your love life. Iconic French actress Catherine Deneuve says the movement is puritanical and men should be able to “hit on women”. New York Times writer Daphne Merkin wants to know “whatever happened to flirting?” The Hollywood Reporter bemoans that #MeToo could “kill sexy Hollywood movies” while Cathy Young at the Los Angeles Times believes it will end office romance. Ross Douthat is even worried that the push to end sexual harassment could stunt population growth.
  • Who knew that humankind’s very existence depended on women’s silence in the face of abuse?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • somehow we’ve reached a point where any behavior short of violent predation – let’s call it the “not as bad as Weinstein” standard – is characterized as misunderstood seduction.
  • There’s a reason so many people are conflating bad and sometimes criminal behavior with romance: traditional ideas about seduction rely on tropes of women witholding sex and men working hard to get it. It’s a narrow notion of heterosexuality – one that does a good job excusing abusive behavior.
  • When will we have more concern for the women hurt by abuse than the men accused of it? One of Roy Moore’s accusers had her house burnt to the ground – arson is suspected. Harper’s magazine was on the brink of publishing the name of a woman who created the Shitty Media Men list before a feminist Twitter campaign stopped it. Some women won’t see justice for years, some ever. This moment isn’t about romance, it’s about abuse. Perhaps the fact that so many people can’t tell the difference is part of the problem.
Javier E

What white people can learn from the Starbucks arrests - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • imagine that these two black men came forward to say they had been wrongly arrested, but there was no video and no white people in the Starbucks corroborated their story. My guess is that a good percentage of white people would assume they had done something to provoke the cops. They were probably too loud. Maybe they were harassing other customers. Perhaps they tried to take something without paying. Much of white America just isn’t ready to believe that black people can get arrested, harassed by cops or beaten for doing little to nothing.
  • many white people tend to think that for a cop to shoot you, or beat you, or arrest you, you must have provoked them in some way. Don’t want police attention? Don’t commit crimes. Don’t hang with the wrong crowd or project an aura of violence and intimidation. Be polite and courteous when interacting with police. Do what you’re told, and you’ll be fine
  • We can’t empathize with the person who was shot because we can’t imagine a scenario in which a cop might consider us potentially dangerous. And that’s because we just don’t do the sorts of things that cause cops to shoot people.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • When many black or Latino or, in some parts of the country, Native American people read about a police shooting of someone like them, the reaction is often more “That could have been me. “There are no precautions to take. It isn’t about not hanging with the wrong crowd, or not talking back to cops, or not engaging in criminal behavior.
  • The “sorts of things” they do that attract police attention are things such as being a U.S. senator driving a nice car, standing outside of a store, walking home after a long shift  at a restaurant, trying to make a living by selling CDs, or waiting for a business associate at a Starbucks. It is simply to exist.
  • we shouldn’t need a viral video and the word of white witnesses to understand that being black or brown often means negotiating an entirely different landscape when it comes to the police (as well as the white people who tend to call the police after seeing black people behave in a way that’s even the slightest bit abnormal).
Javier E

Opinion | Will We Ever Figure Out How to Talk to Boys About Sex? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • they wanted to know whether it was truly possible to “hit it and quit it.
  • one high school junior explained: “Guys need to prove themselves to their guys. So to do that, you’re going to be dominating. You’re going to maybe push. Because, it’s like the girl is just there as a means for him to get off and a means for him to brag.”
  • a large majority of boys never had a single conversation with their parents about, for instance, how to be sure that your partner “wants to be — and is comfortable — having sex with you,” or about what it meant to be a “a caring and respectful sexual partner.”
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Most had never been told by parents not to catcall girls or use degrading terms such as “bitches” or “hoes”
  • this despite the fact that nearly 90 percent of the girls in the survey reported having been sexually harassed.
  • Dan Savage, the syndicated sex advice columnist, refers to “the four magic words” gay guys will use during a sexual encounter: What are you into?” That’s a very different perspective than that of straight boys, who usually aim for one-word assent to options they define.
  • Absent guidance from trusted adults, boys look to the media as a default sex educator, where they are bombarded by images of female sexual availability and male sexual entitlement
  • the reality is that exposure to sexual content in media consumption of any kind — TV, movies, games, social media, music videos — is associated with greater tolerance for sexual harassment, belief in rape myths and the objectification of women.
  • The promise of hot sex with a cold heart animates college (and increasingly high school) hookup culture — which is why, according to Lisa Wade, a professor of sociology at Occidental College, getting wasted beforehand is so crucial: Alcohol girds young people against the near-fanatic generational fear of the awkward while creating what Ms. Wade calls the “compulsory carelessness” necessary for a possible one-off.
  • Most of the guys I met knew that sex with an incapacitated person is assault. Yet because, in their minds, you need to be hammered in order to hook up, the trick became being (and finding someone who is) drunk enough to want to do it but sober enough to be able to express a credible “yes.” And who is to be the judge of that?
  • Alcohol has also been shown to diminish their ability to hear “no” or notice a partner’s hesitation.
  • most guys, in fact, prefer physical intimacy with someone they know, trust and with whom they feel comfortable. I found that to be true, too, though they seemed to view it as their personal quirk, not shared by their peers
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 214 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page