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sarraounia: During the Rwandan genocide, when neighbors killed...

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:53:26 -0400

During the Rwandan genocide, when neighbors killed neighbors and friends betrayed friends, some crossed lines of hatred to protect each other.

At the time of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the Mufti of Rwanda, the most respected Muslim leader in the country, issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims from participating in the killing of the Tutsi. As the country became a slaughterhouse, mosques became places of refuge where Muslims and Christians, Hutus and Tutsis came together to protect each other. KINYARWANDA is based on true accounts from survivors who took refuge at the Grand Mosque of Kigali and the madrassa of Nyanza. It recounts how the Imams opened the doors of the mosques to give refuge to the Tutsi and those Hutu who refused to participate in the killing.

Kinyarwanda, a movie by Alrick Brown

fuckyeahweddingideas: doclouds-havefeet submitted: Gorgeous...

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:53:19 -0400

fuckyeahweddingideas:

doclouds-havefeet submitted: Gorgeous Afghani Bride

sinidentidades: Shoutout to all the trans* women of color whose very existence is resistance.

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:50:35 -0400

sinidentidades:

Shoutout to all the trans* women of color whose very existence is resistance.

fazstreetart: Commentary. In February, I posted two pieces in...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:50:32 -0400

fazstreetart:

Commentary.

In February, I posted two pieces in Bed-Stuy on Tompkins and Halsey. These two pieces got the most attention of any pieces I’ve put up so far. Within a few days, someone had written his response to the work directly onto the posters. From there, a woman wrote a response to him. And it went on and, on with different hand-written comments creating this kind of interesting discussion. The pieces remained up until a week or so ago, when the phallic image was drawn. That’s when I decided to try to take them down.

The “Stop Telling Women to Smile” piece remained in tact enough for me to include it in the exhibition. I thought it was important to present in the show, so that people could view these written reactions.

searchingforknowledge: Fifteen rape victims have formed...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:38:00 -0400

searchingforknowledge:

Fifteen rape victims have formed martial arts movement and are prepared to confront abusers if no one listens to their complaints…

A GROUP of women are fighting back against the sickening culture of rape which they say infects India. Fifteen determined females – all victims themselves – have trained in martial arts and are prepared to hand out rough justice if no one listens to their complaints. And the movement, called the Red Brigade, is growing rapidly following the gang rape and murder of medical student Jyoti Singh Pandey that horrified the world.

In a nation where a woman is reportedly raped every 20 minutes, the group’s leader Usha Vishwakarma said: “We are fighting back – and the boot is now on the other foot.” Member Sufia Hashmi, 17, said: “We’ve caught a lot of men recently. I joined because men always used to pass comments on me and touch my body but now we beat them and they run.”

Like the other members in the northern city of Lucknow, 25- year-old Usha has first-hand experience of the daily dangers women face in the huge nation – a teacher tried to rape her when she was 18. She said: “He grabbed me and tried to open my trousers. I kicked him in the crotch and ran.” Usha complained to staff but they told her to forget it and allowed her attacker to carry on teaching. She said: “Many parents tell girls to quit school so there will be no sexual violence. But we said no – this has to stop. We decided to form a group to fight for ourselves, not just complain.”MORE

marylily2: Can we please just talk about how amazing Yollada...

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:09:38 -0400

marylily2:

Can we please just talk about how amazing Yollada Suanyot is?

-She was elected to represent Mueang Nan District on the Provincial Administration Organization of Nan Province in Thailand.

-She graduated with a science degree from Thammasat University when she was 21.

-She holds a master’s degree in political science.

-She is currently working toward a Ph.D. in social science.

But that’s not all.

-She’s been a model.

-She’s been a beauty queen.

-She’s been a pop group.

Oh, and she’s transgender.

Yep.

That badass lady right there has done all of the above whilst not even being recognised as an actual female but has kept going regardless.

-She also founded and chairs the TransFemale Association of Thailand, which advocates for transgender rights.

-She’s raised a ton of money to pay for transgender operations and has helped so many trans people make their full transition.

Did I mention she owns and manages an entire jewellery line?

So to recap…

-She’s an entrepreneur.
-She’s a beauty queen.
-She’s a model.
-She’s a singer.
-She’s a politician.
-She’s an adovcate for transgender rights.
-She’s got a load of degrees under her belt.

She’s just 30 years old.

I don’t know about you guys but she’s literally a hero to me.

So here’s to Yollada Suanyot for being an awesome and empowering young lady!

"3 percent of the decision-making in media comes from women. That means 97 percent of how women are..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:09:35 -0400

“3 percent of the decision-making in media comes from women. That means 97 percent of how women are portrayed is decided on by men.”

- Independent Lens, PBS
“Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines” (via ihopeyoucontinue4ever)

It also means that 97 percent of how men are portrayed in media are decided on by men. Something to remind MRAs and their ilk of when they complain about the stereotype of men as inept slobs, bad fathers, etc in media and advertising.

Men have the power. So when we men are shat on by the powers that be you don’t get to try and blame women for that.

(via karethdreams)

How much of that is white men tho?

(via howtobeterrell)

Also of that 3% it’s mostly white women

(via strugglingtobeheard)

takealookatyourlife: I feel you.

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:09:20 -0400

takealookatyourlife:

I feel you.

"We tend to think animals are lower than us, but all the scientists in the world couldn’t design and..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:09:17 -0400

“We tend to think animals are lower than us, but all the scientists in the world couldn’t design and operate a bumblebee’s wing. We can’t jump or run very fast, and we can’t carry vast weights like an ant can. We can’t see in the dark and we can’t fly except crammed in a noisy tube like sardines, which doesn’t count. Humans compared to animals are almost totally deaf, and we can’t smell a fart in an elevator by their standards. We are finite and separate, and neurotic, while the consciousness of an animal is at peace and eternal. We strive and go crazy to become more important. Animals rest and sleep and enjoy the company of each other. We think we have evolved upwards from animals but we have lost almost all of their qualities and abilities. The idea that animals don’t have consciousness or that they don’t have a soul is rather crass. It shows a lack of consciousness. They talk, they have families, they feel things, they act individually or together to solve problems, they often care of their young as a tribal unit. They play, they travel, and medicate themselves when they get sick. They cry when others in the herd die, they know about us humans. Of course they have a soul, a very pristine one. We humans are only now attempting with the recent rise in consciousness to achieve the soul that animals have naturally.”

- Stuart Wilde (via floralnymph)

This <3

(via karly-warly)

Good morning.

(via sonofbaldwin)

Griner: Mulkey said keep quiet on sexuality

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:09:14 -0400

Griner: Mulkey said keep quiet on sexuality:

karly-warly:

Former Baylor women’s basketball star Brittney Griner says that Kim Mulkey, her college head coach, told players not to be open publically about their sexuality because it would hurt recruiting and look bad for the program.

“I told Coach [Mulkey] when she was recruiting me. I was like, ‘I’m gay. I hope that’s not a problem,’ and she told me that it wasn’t,” Griner said. “I mean, my teammates knew, obviously they all knew. Everybody knew about it.”

Baylor University, a private Baptist school located in Waco, Texas, has a “Statement on Human Sexuality” in its student handbook. Located under the label “Sexual Misconduct,” it says that “Christian churches across the ages and around the world have affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm. Temptations to deviate from this norm include both heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior. It is thus expected that Baylor students will not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching.”

percabeth-winchester: tardismyoldgirl: colinostahpit: adrianes...

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:09:09 -0400

percabeth-winchester:

tardismyoldgirl:

colinostahpit:

adrianestpierre:

Gaston really is the most terrifying Disney villain because he could be anyone in the world.

^ this

he could be the French Romney…..

THE FRENCH ROMNEY

"Women invented all the core technologies that made civilization possible. This isn’t some feminist..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:09:00 -0400

“

Women invented all the core technologies that made civilization possible. This isn’t some feminist myth; it’s what modern anthropologists believe. Women are thought to have invented pottery, basketmaking, weaving, textiles, horticulture, and agriculture. That’s right: without women’s inventions, we wouldn’t be able to carry things or store things or tie things up or go fishing or hunt with nets or haft a blade or wear clothes or grow our food or live in permanent settlements. Suck on that.

Women have continued to be involved in the creation and advancement of civilization throughout history, whether you know it or not. Pick anything—a technology, a science, an art form, a school of thought—and start digging into the background. You’ll find women there, I guarantee, making critical contributions and often inventing the damn shit in the first place.

Women have made those contributions in spite of astonishing hurdles. Hurdles like not being allowed to go to school. Hurdles like not being allowed to work in an office with men, or join a professional society, or walk on the street, or own property. Example: look up Lise Meitner some time. When she was born in 1878 it was illegal in Austria for girls to attend school past the age of 13. Once the laws finally eased up and she could go to university, she wasn’t allowed to study with the men. Then she got a research post but wasn’t allowed to use the lab on account of girl cooties. Her whole life was like this, but she still managed to discover nuclear fucking fission. Then the Nobel committee gave the prize to her junior male colleague and ignored her existence completely.

Men in all patriarchal civilizations, including ours, have worked to downplay or deny women’s creative contributions. That’s because patriarchy is founded on the belief that women are breeding stock and men are the only people who can think. The easiest way for men to erase women’s contributions is to simply ignore that they happened. Because when you ignore something, it gets forgotten. People in the next generation don’t hear about it, and so they grow up thinking that no women have ever done anything. And then when women in their generation do stuff, they think “it’s a fluke, never happened before in the history of the world, ignore it.” And so they ignore it, and it gets forgotten. And on and on and on. The New York Times article is a perfect illustration of this principle in action.

Finally, and this is important: even those women who weren’t inventors and intellectuals, even those women who really did spend all their lives doing stereotypical “women’s work”—they also built this world. The mundane labor of life is what makes everything else possible. Before you can have scientists and engineers and artists, you have to have a whole bunch of people (and it’s usually women) to hold down the basics: to grow and harvest and cook the food, to provide clothes and shelter, to fetch the firewood and the water, to nurture and nurse, to tend and teach. Every single scrap of civilized inventing and dreaming and thinking rides on top of that foundation. Never forget that.

”

- from a post by Reclusive Leftist on women’s erasure in history.

her comments relate specifically to an article by the NYT thanking “the men” who invented modern technology, but pick absolutely any academic field of study, and women’s contributions are minimized, if not outright ignored.

literature has been a huge part of my life for a long time, and i grew up reading the classics—which, of course, are typically books written by white men, depicting their experiences. i was taught that the first “modern novel” was Don Quixote, written in the early 1600s by a guy (Cervantes). i don’t think i know of a word to accurately describe my mixture of outrage, shock, and pride, when i discovered later that actually, the first modern novel was written 600 years earlier—by a woman! (it’s The Tale of Genji, written by a Japanese lady-in-waiting who was known as Murasaki Shikibu.)

this might not seem important, but if you’re a woman you know just how vital this knowledge is. even now, when women are being told that we can do anything we set our minds to, the historical, literary, and scientific figures we learn about are all men. it’s a much more insidious way to discourage women from aiming high—because what’s the point in putting in so much hard work if it’s not even going to be remembered after you’re dead?

(via sendforbromina)

"[F]or the first several years the SAT was offered, males scored higher than females on the Math..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:42:28 -0400

“[F]or the first several years the SAT was offered, males scored higher than females on the Math section but females achieved higher scores on the Verbal section. ETS policy-makers determined that the Verbal test needed to be “balanced” more in favor of males, and added questions pertaining to politics, business and sports to the Verbal portion. Since that time, males have outscored females on both the Math and Verbal sections. Dwyer notes that no similar effort has been made to “balance” the Math section, and concludes that, “It could be done, but it has not been, and I believe that probably an unconscious form of sexism underlies this pattern. When females show the superior performance, ‘balancing’ is required; when males show the superior performance, no adjustments are necessary.” “”

- “Gender Bias in College Admissions Tests”, FairTest.org

And then people urge me everything is fine, of course it is, when you’re ignoring statistics that is.

(via cwnl)

viola-davis: Charlie Rose: Are you where you thought you would...

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:27:03 -0400

viola-davis:

Charlie Rose: Are you where you thought you would be? Are you further than you thought you would be? Have you had the opportunity to show how good you are? [x]

islawmix: Maybe we can finally get rid of that BBC stock image...

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:26:46 -0400

islawmix:

Maybe we can finally get rid of that BBC stock image of ‘veils of Muslim world’.

Knowing Coves: The Racist Myth of MSG and 'Chinese Restaurant Syndrome'

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:26:20 -0400

Knowing Coves: The Racist Myth of MSG and 'Chinese Restaurant Syndrome':

zuky:

This is the story of a racist myth that began with a light-hearted letter to the New England Journal of Medicine in 1968 and subsequently exploded in North American culture — in direct opposition to every shred of scientific evidence — becoming so prevalent that credulous eaters buy into it to the point of experiencing its effects on a purely psychosomatic basis.

It’s often been called “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” and its premise is that MSG in Chinese food results in unpleasant allergic reactions. Interestingly enough, higher quantities of MSG in non-Chinese foods are not reported to have the same effects. MSG is a naturally occurring amino acid, and some of the highest levels of MSG a North American consumer is likely to ingest come in vine-ripened tomatoes, aged cheese, and dry-aged steak — yet there is no reported medical phenomenon known as “Italian Food Syndrome” or “American Steakhouse Syndrome”.

Monosodium glutamate was first isolated from the seaweed kombu, commonly used in the Japanese broth dashi, by biochemist Kikunae Ikeda of the Tokyo Imperial University in 1908. He named its taste umami because it differed from the five conventional flavours of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and spicy. Ikeda patented his discovery and MSG became commercially available in 1909. It was found to enhance flavours with one third of the amount of sodium as traditional salt, i.e. sodium chloride. In this sense, monosodium glutamate is probably healthier than sodium chloride because it achieves flavour with reduced sodium levels.

MSG was immediately popular in Asia and became common in the North American food industry after World War II, used in baby food, canned soup, vegetable juice, frozen food, as well as seasoning mix brands such as Accent. Yet somehow in the 1960s, this popular food additive became associated with Chinese food and deemed a health hazard. Why? Because Chinese people, culture, and food have been targeted by widespread and effective racist hate campaigns in North America since the 19th century, buttressed by wild claims that the Chinese are “unclean”, carry diseases, are sexually-deviant opium addicts, inscrutable and sneaky, a Yellow Peril.

The 1968 letter to the New England Journal of Medicine which solidified the myth of MSG was actually written by a Chinese immigrant named Robert Ho Man Kwok, who described “numbness at the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness and palpitation” after eating in American Chinese restaurants. The letter opened the floodgates to a barage of letters and related articles complaining of headaches, dizziness, paralysis of the throat, tingling in the temples, tightness of the jaw, irregular heartbeat, depression, hyperactivity, and all manner of digestive ailments.

Given this preponderance of anecdotal evidence, numerous scientific studies have been performed since then attempting to identify this “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome”. The funny thing is that no study has ever been able to do so. When people don’t know that they’re consuming MSG, they don’t suffer adverse reactions. All national and international food safety bodies have concluded that MSG is perfectly safe. People in Japan eat MSG every single day and the Japanese have the longest life expectancy in the world.

Fear of MSG is a racist remnant of the Chinese Exclusion era which exists only in North America and has been thoroughly debunked by science. Yet racist socialization is so powerful that people actually experience physical effects such as headaches, depression, and indigestion based solely on their indoctrinated fear of Chinese people and Chinese food. Think it over next time you eat parmesan cheese or a vine-ripened tomato.

Photo

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:26:15 -0400

mowwwg: “you can’t wear that!!!! people will get the wrong impression!!!” the impression that i am...

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:26:10 -0400

mowwwg:

“you can’t wear that!!!! people will get the wrong impression!!!”

the impression that i am a hot babe with an ass that just won’t quit???? honey that ain’t wrong that’s just fact

Obama warns on US military sexual assaults

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:26:03 -0400

Obama warns on US military sexual assaults:

sonofbaldwin:

[Trigger Warning: Rape, Rape Culture]

President Barack Obama has said sexual harassment and assault will not be tolerated in the US military.

His spoke as figures showed reported sexual assaults in the US military rose from 3,192 to 3,374 in 2012.

But as many attacks go unreported, officials estimate the total number of sexual assaults stands at 26,000, up from 19,000 last year.

It comes after the officer tasked with stopping sexual crimes in the US Air Force was charged with sexual battery.

Lt Col Jeff Krusinski

Lt Col Jeff Krusinski, 41, was arrested on Sunday accused of grabbing a woman’s breasts and buttocks in a car park in Virginia, police said.

The Air Force has been criticised after a slew of sexual assault cases at its main training centre in Texas.

RUGBY PLAYERS DON'T GO ON DIETS:

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:25:55 -0400

teachmehowtorugby:

*Untitled*