Women's Issues // Current

Tight pants banned women in Indonesian Religous district

NO...Your Moving Backwards JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) -- Muslim women would be banned... more

ksutherland27
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Business Networking sites see 18% rise in Female members

The largest growing economic force in the world isn't China or India -- it's women, and this is matched with online usage – says Meettheboss.com study.

The largest growing economic force in the world is not China or India it is Women. The earning power of women globally is expected to reach $18 trillion by 2014, a $5 trillion rise according to World Bank estimates. That is more than twice the estimated 2014 GDP of China and India combined. Although the average women still earns only 77 cents for every dollar men do this is set to grow as more and more women are finding themselves in board rooms.

Such career advancement has brought the female workforce online to share ideas and best business practices. MeettheBoss.com (a world leading online business network) has shown an increase of female sign-ups of 18% from this time last year.

“It is fantastic to see so many women embrace the technology and use it to their advantage, every day I see more and more online” Harlan Davies, MeettheBoss director.

MeettheBoss maintains that the site will not be making any changes for the rush of its new female members “The current way companies appeal to women is to take a male product and paint it pink but this is both patronizing and unnecessary, our members are extremely powerful business people and would not rise to such gimmicks”

The site boasts innovative connectivity amongst peers with an internal Video Conferencing tool as well as Instant Messaging, forums, blogs, tweets and up to the minute news fed individually to each user based on their unique business interests. This sophisticated online aggregation has been popular to the sites members and has seen leading business women such as Isabelle M. Conner Global Head of Marketing ING Group, Dr Anne Phillips, Medicine Development Leader, GlaxoSmithKline and Joanna Young Human, SVP, Liberty Mutual take the limelight and give online presentations to the entire community through MeettheBoss TV on their views of best business practices.The largest growing economic force in the world isn't China or India -- it's women,... more

JFunnell
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16 days ago
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Ten Black Women Missing or Dead And You Have Not Heard About It…Why???

Ten women have been found slain or have been declared missing in Rocky Mount, N.C., in... more

Apocalipstick
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18 days ago
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46 comments

The C-Section Backlash

As the rate of C-sections skyrockets, women are fighting back with angry blogs and... more

atomiclegion
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24 days ago
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1 comment

Islamist group al Shabaab takes over Somalia. Whips women for wearing bras

Somalia's hardline Islamist group al Shabaab has publicly whipped women for wearing... more

Chod77
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25 days ago
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3 comments

Bans 'do not cut abortion rate'

Restricting the availability of legal abortion does not appear to reduce the number of... more

Vierotchka
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28 days ago
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4 comments

Ralph Lauren Model Photoshop Outrage!

On September 29th, Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin posted the ad, which originally appeared... more

shroomfairy
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1 month ago
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2 comments

First Woman to Win This Nobel Since 64'?

Israeli scientist Ada Yonath, as well as American scientists Venkatraman Ramakrishnan... more

IngloriousBitch
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1 month ago
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2 comments

Egypt prof wants death for 'virginity' importers

An Egyptian professor wants the death penalty for 'virginity' importers. WTF,... more

FreshPlastic
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1 month ago
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4 comments

Riz Khan-Reducing maternal mortality- Part 1

More than half a million women die from pregnancy and child birth related... more

Vierotchka
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1 month ago
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2 comments

New Agency for Women Emerges at U.N. Session

not widely publicized, but "it was about time that the world got serious about how... more

ryan8566
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1 month ago
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The Man Rules...sent to me by a woman -

At last a guy has taken the time to write this all down. Finally, the guys' side of... more

boykit
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1 month ago
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5 comments

End Women's Suffrage

This is a bunch of videos where young people sign a petition to end women's suffrage.

arturogarza
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1 month ago
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I Wouldn't Dream of Wearing a Bikini.

Entering my twenties I felt pretty down about my appearance, most all the time... for... more

anger
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1 month ago
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1 comment

Marie Claire writer doesn't want to see your doughy body in the locker room

Lea Goldman of Marie Claire is "baffled, even horrified, by women who treat the locker room like their own sandalwood-scented boudoir," and I am baffled, even horrified, by the way she talks about said women.

Goldman, who admits that she wasn't raised in a "naked home," and that she still finds "the bare female form pretty foreign," just wants everyone in the dressing room to cover themselves up, as the sight of her fellow gym patrons in the nip offends her sensibilities:

"As I scampered from the shower to my locker, clutching a threadbare gym-issued towel barely wide enough to cover me, I caught sight of a doughy naked woman, her nipples the size of salami slices, holding aloft a compact as she carefully plucked her eyebrows. I was so distracted by her brazen nudity - by the boobs, folds, moles, and thatch - that I walked right into an open locker door, prompting the kind of woozy spell that, had I been a cartoon character, would have been accompanied by chirping birds."

Ah yes, the "doughy naked woman" with large nipples. God forbid she dare to pluck her eyebrows (a beauty standard pushed by magazines like...Marie Claire) naked. Who the hell does she think she is, not having a body like Angelina Jolie and being comfortable enough with herself and her naked body to take care of her damn unibrow with her apparently not-Lea-Goldman-approved boobs hanging out? The nerve of some people!

Goldman goes on to describe the other horrors she's witnessed in the locker room: women clipping their toenails (quelle horreur!), brushing their teeth (dental hygiene! Disgusting!), and watching women "slather lotion on their haunches like they were being filmed for the Spice Channel." What Goldman fails to realize is that the women in the locker room are merely lotioning their legs: the seedy Spice Channel aspect of it is a product of her own imagination, which apparently goes into overdrive the second she steps into the ladies room. "The locker room is no place for that kind of preening," Goldman argues. Then what the hell is the locker room for?Lea Goldman of Marie Claire is "baffled, even horrified, by women who treat the locker... more

fountaingoats
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2 months ago
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Iran appoints first-ever female cabinet minister, clerics chagrined

The first Iranian female cabinet minister to be appointed since the foundation of the... more

jeffissleeping
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2 months ago
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Truck-stop girls

Part of this week's New York Times Magazine special issue, Saving the World's Women. Come discuss all the articles at current.com/feminism.

In May, I was traveling down a South African highway with a colleague and a driver, headed toward Swaziland. A private foundation had assigned me to assess a health clinic that it set up for truckers and the girls and women who trade sex with them for cash and goods. Truckers are well known to transmit H.I.V. up and down the highways. And Swaziland, a small, landlocked country dependent on its busy trucking corridors, is particularly troublesome. It has the highest H.I.V. rate in the world: one in three people is infected.

When we reached the Osheok border post, the Swazi official welcomed us, inspecting the vehicle efficiently. Apart from a gas station, a dozen roadside vegetable stands and some dingy bars, there was little activity in the little border town. Adjacent to the customs office, there was a small building fashioned from a shipping container with a hand-painted sign outside: “Truckers Wellness Center.” It’s an innovative way to set up a clinic. While papers are processed at customs, truckers use the clinic to obtain medications for “hot urine” and other sexually transmitted diseases.

We watched truckers filing into the clinic throughout the evening, but there were no girls. So I wandered up and chatted with the border official, who said: “You want girls? Then go to Matsapha. They’ll attack your car!” Matsapha is the main overnight hub for truckers. It was well past 11 p.m., but we decided to go there. As we drove, the “majestic mountains, fertile valleys and lush forests” described in Swaziland guidebooks appeared only as shadows.

Matsapha was still, almost abandoned. A lone gas attendant directed us to the edge of town and an old sign on a hill for the Economy Flats motel. The driver slowed, and as the official predicted, about 10 girls in tiny dresses and little shorts swarmed around our vehicle. But when they saw my female colleague and me, they screamed and went off. I sent the driver out to negotiate. “Tell them we just want to talk,” I said. “I’ll buy them dinner.” The lure of food was enough. Three girls got in the car, and we drove down a narrow, beaten track through the trees to a rundown complex of rough cement-block buildings. This was their home. This was where the truckers slept and the girls earned their meals.Part of this week's New York Times Magazine special issue, Saving the World's Women.... more

fountaingoats
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3 months ago
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A school bus for Shamsia - female education in Afghanistan

Part of this week's New York Times Magazine special issue, Saving the World's Women. Discuss all of the articles at current.com/feminism.

EVEN BEFORE THE men with acid came, the Mirwais Mena School for Girls was surrounded by enemies. It stood on the outskirts of Kandahar, barely 20 miles from the hometown of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder. Just down the road from the school, in an area known as Old Town, residents had built a shrine to Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban commander with the fiercest reputation, who made his name by massacring members of the Hazara minority. He was killed in an American-led operation in 2007. Also nearby sat the Sarposa Prison, where, in June 2008, Taliban fighters and suicide bombers attacked, freeing more than a thousand criminals and comrades. The area around the Mirwais Mena School is the Taliban heartland. Teaching girls to read was not something that would escape their notice. Across the country, the Taliban have made the destruction of schools, particularly schools for girls, a hallmark of their war.

The Mirwais Mena School — L-shaped, cement, two stories, with canvas tents donated by the United Nations — was built in 2004 with a grant from the Japanese government. A plaque out front gives the date; it hangs on the 10-foot-high cement wall built to shield the students. Kandahar’s Mirwais Mena neighborhood sits just off the national highway. A rutted mud path called Panjwai Road cuts through the center of the neighborhood and up an outcropping of bare rock that rises 500 feet. A single electrical wire runs into Mirwais Mena from a pole along the highway; no one can remember the last time it carried any current.

The attackers appeared in the morning on Nov. 12 of last year, as the girls were walking to school. The men came on three motorcycles, each one carrying a driver and a man on back. They wore masks. Each of the men riding on back carried a small container filled with battery acid. The masked men circled for several minutes as the girls streamed to school. Then they moved in.

Shamsia Husseini and her sister, Atifa, were walking along the highway when they spotted the men on the motorbikes. Shamsia, then 17, was old enough to be married; she was wearing a black scarf that covered most of her face. Shamsia had seen Taliban gunmen before and figured the men on the motorcycles would pass. Then one of the bikes pulled alongside her, and the man on back jumped off. Through the mask, he asked Shamsia what seemed like a strange question.

“Are you going to school?”

The masked man pulled the scarf away from Shamsia’s face and, with his other hand, pumped the trigger on his spray gun. Shamsia felt as if her face and eyes were on fire. As she screamed, the masked man reached for Atifa, who was already running. He pulled at her and tore her scarf away and pumped the spray into her back. The men sped off toward another group of girls. Shamsia lay in the street holding her burning face.Part of this week's New York Times Magazine special issue, Saving the World's Women.... more

fountaingoats
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3 months ago
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Hillary Clinton - A new gender agenda

This interview with Hillary Clinton is part of this week's New York Times Magazine... more

fountaingoats
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3 months ago
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The feminist hawks

Part of this week's NYT special issue, Saving the World's Women. Discuss all the articles at current.com/feminism.

How do big ideas spread on the Internet, and how are they changed in the process?

Consider the feminist-hawk position — the one that advocates the use of force to liberate Muslim women from persecution and burkas. This position has become an integral part of the ideological Web. Feminist-hawk arguments may even be considered an artifact of the Web, just the way the revolutionary arguments of 18th-century America can be seen as an artifact of pamphlets.

In the late 1990s, an e-mail petition of unclear origin began to circulate. It was called “The Taliban Is Waging a War on Women!” Styled like a chain letter, it came in several variations, each featuring reports of misogynistic crimes in Afghanistan. (“One woman was beaten to DEATH by an angry mob of fundamentalists for accidentally exposing her arm.”) If you signed, you agreed that the United Nations ought to, by “support and action,” show its intolerance for “the situation overseas.”

The petition blamed the Afghan regime and not Muslim culture for the abuses of women, and some iterations sought to pre-empt relativists who would “excuse everything on cultural grounds.” The petition typically carried a list of signatories, some with M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s, from cities like Grenoble, Cleveland and New Delhi.

Unlike Revolutionary-era pamphlets, the petition did not ground its case in political theory. Instead, it relied on the promise of global participation implicit in online communication. It made clear that a far-flung community with eyes and ears everywhere — and connections in high places — already existed. You could add your name to its moral ranks with a few keystrokes.

Today that e-mail message rarely lands in in-boxes, and when it’s cited, it’s mostly to show the oppressiveness of spam. (“The Taliban has since been removed from power,” says BreaktheChain, an anti-junk-mail site. “Too bad this chain letter can’t similarly be ‘removed.’ ”) This is a mistake. Though the petition didn’t stop the Taliban, it sounded a meaningful alarm. It also codified a polemical line that has, unexpectedly, become a war horse of hawkish bloggers.

David Horowitz, the conservative firebrand, is among those who have seized on the feminist-hawk position. Horowitz may not be an obvious feminist, but as someone who has dedicated his life to political media (producing or contributing to magazines, books, political ads, cable news, talk radio, blogs, video podcasts, even a pamphlet), he’s adroit at adapting ideologies for media platforms. Right now, this one is working for him.

Like many conservatives, Horowitz appears to have come to feminist-hawkism after 9/11. But in his hands, the ideology has fast became a tenacious memebrid — as Tim Hwang, a sociologist and the director of the Web Ecology Project, calls memes that unite two or more cultural phenomena.

“The neat marriage of hawkish tendencies and feminist framing of issues does this quite effectively,” Hwang explained to me in an e-mail message. Borrowing left-wing shibboleths is one way that “conservative ideas can make it big in a generally more liberal online social sphere,” he wrote. Furthermore, to depict Islamic regimes less as terrorists than as repressors of civil liberties may appeal even to traditional isolationists, as it “plays off of the strong communities of libertarians that dominate some prominent spaces.”

Hawkish sites that have taken up feminism include Little Green Footballs, Jihad Watch and Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine. On a recent day, the home page of the last featured reports of female prisoners being raped in Iran; prepubescent girls getting married in Gaza; and a possible honor killing by an immigrant in New York. This material is expected to help seal Horowitz’s general case for the war on terror, though he has not yet changed the name of his cause to, say, the war on misogyny.Part of this week's NYT special issue, Saving the World's Women. Discuss all the... more

fountaingoats
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3 months ago
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tagged w/ Women's Issues

Tight pants banned women in Indonesian Religous district

Business Networking sites see 18% rise in Female members

Ten Black Women Missing or Dead And You Have Not Heard About It…Why???

The C-Section Backlash

Islamist group al Shabaab takes over Somalia. Whips women for wearing bras

Bans 'do not cut abortion rate'

Ralph Lauren Model Photoshop Outrage!

First Woman to Win This Nobel Since 64'?

Egypt prof wants death for 'virginity' importers

Riz Khan-Reducing maternal mortality- Part 1

New Agency for Women Emerges at U.N. Session

The Man Rules...sent to me by a woman -

End Women's Suffrage

I Wouldn't Dream of Wearing a Bikini.

Marie Claire writer doesn't want to see your doughy body in the locker room

Iran appoints first-ever female cabinet minister, clerics chagrined

Truck-stop girls

A school bus for Shamsia - female education in Afghanistan

Hillary Clinton - A new gender agenda

The feminist hawks

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