The Auckland University Students Association is putting on a Womensfest September 21-25.

It’s time for another Womensfest! The AUSA Womens’ Rights Officers have been working around the clock to bring you a great week filled with events on womens’ rights, issues, culture and intersectionality! Don’t miss it – come along and get empowered!

Good stuff, right? But there’s a problem.

One planned item is the Vagina Cupcake event.

Uh oh.

One response:

Hiya WROs! I was one of the WROs in 2011 and I’ve learned a lot since then. For example, we did things for fun (luckily not during our Womensfest, but unfortunately during our KATE) like vulva origami and vulva cupcakes, for exactly the same reasons as

More in the unofficial series on slavery around the world – slave labor on Thai fishing boats.

Akaradetch Seri had a fight with his girl friend one day and found himself homeless. He spent the night on a park bench where ever such a nice man approached him and offered him a place to stay.

The man mentioned he could stay at a friend’s house, what turned out to be a stark room inhabited by several others. The front door remained bolted, and Seri became worried when asked not to leave under any circumstances.

After several days, the men were taken to a port and loaded into a ship’s barren hull, then ferried to Indonesia and forced to board

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, tweeted a cartoon a couple of days ago:

Someone they haven’t shut up yet:

Ahmad Al-shathry ‏@Abunass3r Sep 2
@KenRoth That’s a Saudi Arabian political cartoon, by the way. Drawn by @jabertoon his work appears regularly in our news papers

Natasha Fatah and Nahayat Tizhoosh produced a story for the CBC on the failure of the Gulf states to accept any refugees at all.

 … Read the rest

Pure, virtuous Saudi Arabia.

The Ministry of Social Affairs has banned Saudi families from adopting Syrian or other foreign children.

“The ministry does not sponsor Arab children who lost their parents in conflicts, such as in Syria and Iraq. There are global humanitarian organizations that deal with these cases,” said Latifah Al-Tamimi, director of social supervision at the ministry in the Eastern Province.

So their god hates children, too. No surprise there.

Bloomberg reports that refugees from Syria feel more welcome in Europe than in the Gulf states.

Searching for a new home, Yassir Batal says Germany and its unfamiliar voices and customs are more enticing for his wife and five children than the wealthy Arab states whose culture,

Whatever problem it is you want to address…just blame it on women. It makes everything so much simpler. The Malay Mail Online reports on an example of that simplification process:

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 4 — A Friday sermon by Federal Territories’ Islamic authorities today blamed women who do not cover their “aurat,” or intimate body parts, for causing social ills that would affect even those who do.

In its sermon distributed to mosques under its jurisdiction, the Federal Territories Islamic Department (Jawi) also compared uncovered women to uncovered dishes, which it said are bound to frequented by flies, making them unappetising.

Women’s filthy intimate body parts cause all the problems, plus, they draw flies and are just plain disgusting.… Read the rest

Kate Smurthwaite has some thoughts on the pope’s “pardon” for abortions.

As I am the official representative of womb-operators (as well as being a comedian I’m also the Media Spokesperson for Abortion Rights UK – you’d be amazed how much overlap the roles have) every journalist and radio presenter has been tripping over themselves to ask me if I’m PLEASED. One even went so far as to ask whether I couldn’t manage a ‘small hooray’.

But any transitory modicum of elation I might have felt at the news that his Holiness has taken one tiny step away from the misogynist medieval attitude that my uterus is any of his damn business is more than swamped by the fury I’m

Mona Eltahawy tweeted an interesting graphic:

 … Read the rest

Terry Glavin in the Ottawa Citizen yesterday:

“The worst part of it is the feeling that we don’t have any allies,” Montreal’s Faisal Alazem, the tireless 32-year-old campaigner for the Syrian-Canadian Council, told me the other day. “That is what people in the Syrian community are feeling.”

There are feelings of deep gratitude for having been welcomed into Canada, Alazem said. But with their homeland being reduced to an apocalyptic nightmare – the barrel-bombing of Aleppo and Homs, the beheadings of university professors, the demolition of Palmyra’s ancient temples – among Syrian Canadians there is also an unquenchable sorrow.

…

But among Syrian-Canadians, the worst thing of all, Alazem said, is a suffocating feeling of solitude and betrayal. “In

Seen on Twitter:

History of Astronomy ‏@hist_astro 5 hours ago
Lunar eclipse (khusuf) in Turkish version of “Wonders of Creation” by al-Qazwini, 1717 copy @walters_museum.

Lori Watson, Professor of Philosophy and Director of Gender Studies at the University of San Diego, asks: What is a “woman” anyway?

Radical feminism has theorized “woman.” One of its more salient contributions for this context is showing that what it means to be a woman is not an absolute; it’s relative.

The category “woman” and the category “man,” the groups “women” and “men,” are relational. One does not socially exist without the other.   For all the vexing about nature, social categorization is what is being dealt with here.   Men without women don’t exist as socially defined. Women without men don’t exist as such either.   The categories are equal in their relational existence. Unfortunately, such equality doesn’t extend to their

Because people talked about this on the Oliver Sacks – Temple Grandin thread: a website about CAFOs.

In the United States and other parts of the world, livestock production is becoming increasingly dominated by concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). In a CAFO, animals are crammed by the thousands or tens of thousands, often unable to breathe fresh air, see the light of day, walk outside, peck at a plants or insects, scratch the earth, or eat a blade of grass.

Over 50 billion food animals are raised and slaughtered every year (not including massive quantities of farmed fish). Grazing and growing feed for livestock now occupy 70 percent of all agricultural land and 30 percent of the ice-free

Oh but, Christie Wilcox at Discover reports that the dolphin-assisted birth didn’t happen.

According to the documentary, Dorina did not go through with her watery plans. She went into labor at night, and thus had a natural birth on land. But, she did say she could feel the dolphins ‘sending positive energy’.

Below is my original commentary on the practice of dolphin-assisted births, from 2013. But the tl;dr version: Dolphins are wild animals. Wild animals do not make good midwives.

Because wild animals can get bitey and tossy and killy.

But there’s another quite compelling reason, which is that they’re not trained. Midwifery isn’t just hanging around sympathetically you know – midwives have to do things. Swimming isn’t enough.… Read the rest

Apparently this is not something from the Onion.

Dorina Rosin, a “spiritual healer,” plans to give birth in the sea with the aid of dolphins. Among other benefits, Rosin and partner Maika Suneagle believe that their baby will speak dolphin.

Really? They believe that how? If they had a Chinese midwife, would they believe their baby would therefore speak Chinese?

Also, what kind of aid do they think the dolphins will give?

Do they pause to recollect that dolphins are carnivores? Do they know what a carnivore is? Would they consider giving birth on the savanna with the aid of lions?

“In 2011 and 2014 I had the privilege to learn from and with wild and free dolphins and

Aylan Kurdi’s father says what happened – the tiny boat flipped in five-foot waves, and his two little boys and their mother drowned over the course of three hours.

The father of Galip and Aylan Kurdi, the young refugee boys from Syria whose drowning off a Turkish beach has touched a global nerve, said Thursday that his family had paid smugglers more than $2,000 for a voyage to a Greek island in a 15-foot boat that was quickly upended by five-foot waves. His wife also drowned.

“The waves were high, the boat started swaying and shaking. We were terrified,” said the father, Abdullah Kurdi, 40, a Syrian Kurd from the town of Kobani near the Turkish border. “I rushed to

Listen up – you have to stop saying “poly” when you mean “polyamorous.” Aida Manduley says so.

In case you haven’t stumbled upon this (I just heard about it two days ago myself),  here’s the scoop—a Polynesian person on Tumblr made the following call to action:

Hey, can any polyamory blogs with a follower count please inform the palagi portion of the community that “poly” is a Polynesian community identifier, and is important to our safe spaces.
Using “polyamory” is cool just like using “polygender” and “Polyromantic” and or Polysexual” is cool. But the abbreviation “poly” is already in use.

Oh well then, that settles it. An abbreviation that’s already in use can never be used by other people … Read the rest

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/threeyearold-ultraorthodox-jewish-children-told-the-nonjews-are-evil-in-worksheet-produced-by-school-10481682.html

British three-year-olds have been told “the non-Jews” are “evil” in a Kindergarten worksheet handed out at ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools in north London, it can be revealed.

Documents seen by The Independent show children are taught about the horrors of the Holocaust when they are still in kindergarten at the Beis Rochel boys’ school in north London.

A whistle-blower, who wished to remain anonymous, has shown The Independent a worksheet given to boys aged three and four at the school…

The document refers to Nazis only as “goyim” – a term for non-Jews some people argue is offensive.

The issue isn’t so much that it’s “offensive,” I would think, but that it implies that all non-Jews are genocidal fascists.

Emily