More from the piece on prostitution in Germany by Manuela Schon at Feminist Current. There’s a section on…prostitution in the educational system.

Pro Familia, a member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), is an organization that advises schools in their sex education materials. Among the material they recommended for teenagers is a book called, “Sexualpädagogik der Vielfalt“ (which loosely translates to “Sexual Pedagogy of Diversity”). This text includes suggestions and material for projects in which students are asked to name sex positions and to “modernize a brothel.” In small groups they are to discuss what “services” a “Freudenhaus der sexuellen Lebenslust” (which  loosely translates to “pleasure house of sexual lust for life”) should offer.

Those who protested this

The New York Times reports on the feminist side of Donald Trump.

Hahahahaha no just kidding, of course.

Mr. Trump was not just fixated on the appearance of the women around him. He possessed an almost compulsive need to talk about it.

Inside the Trump Organization, the company that manages his various businesses, he occasionally interrupted routine discussions of business to opine on women’s figures. Ms. Res, his construction executive, remembered a meeting in which she and Mr. Trump interviewed an architect for a project in the Los Angeles area. Out of the blue, she said, Mr. Trump evaluated the fitness of women in Marina del Rey, Calif. “They take care of their asses,” he said.

“The architect and

From Feminist Current, legalized pimping in Germany:

A flat-rate brothel chain called “Pussy Club” made headlines when, on its opening day on June 5, 2009, 1,700 men lined up to get in. The long lineups outside women’s rooms lasted until closing time when many of the women collapsed from exhaustion, pain, injuries, and infections, including painful rashes and fungal infections that spread from their genitals down their legs. It was shut down a year later for human trafficking.

Flat-rate brothels are very common in Germany, as well as “tabuslos,” meaning “no taboos.” In practice, this translates to “everything without any protection.” As a result, STDs are on the rise in Germany (HIV rates have gone up after several

From Science Daily a year ago:

New research from the University of Alabama at Birmingham shows that high-heeled-shoe-related injuries doubled between 2002 and 2012. The findings were published online May 12 in the Journal of Foot and Ankle Injuries, and the frequency and severity of those injuries were sufficient to make the investigators suggest that wearing the appropriate shoes for the appropriate occasion and being aware of one’s surroundings are good ideas.

“Although high-heeled shoes might be stylish, from a health standpoint, it would be worthwhile for those interested in wearing high-heeled shoes to understand the risks and the potential harm that precarious activities in high-heeled shoes can cause,” said lead investigator Gerald McGwin, Ph.D., vice chair and professor

It’s Saturday, so have a treat. Art and colors on Facebook:

… Read the rest

Janice Turner wrote a piece at the Times titled The trans lobby peddles a pink and blue world. I expect that will get her added to The Index if she’s not there already, but it’s true.

A friend of hers commented that he thought she was gender fluid, and she was taken aback.

I’d never thought about my gender identity before. It hadn’t occurred to me that not being a “girly” girl meant I wasn’t 100 per cent woman. The point, I’ve always believed, is to expand the categories “man” and “woman”, to tear down pink and blue prisons. So a little girl can like trucks, spacemen, getting dirty and still be a girl; a boy can put on

Originally a comment by Steamshovelmama on Faithful and regular worshippers, a post about a council-funded bus service that refused to pick up a student because he’s not Catholic.

OK, I’ve found some more out about this.

The parents of the boy in question have chosen to send him to Holy Trinity Academy (yes, bloody academy status, thank you David Cameron) rather than to one of the geographically nearest schools. Because that has been their choice, the local council expects the parents to arrange and fund school journeys. Where the geographically nearest school has been accepted it is the local council’s role to ensure that journey is safe and affordable – for instance some pupils may be eligible for a … Read the rest

Rose Hackman writes in the Guardian that a major part of the emotional labor women are forced to do is the de-escalation of incidents of harassment.

Years later, I realized the abuse was less in the act I had been subjected to, and more in my learned silence. De-escalation had been my trick, to the detriment of my agency.

A blog entry from last fall put this into words for me. It made me realise [w]hat women around me had been doing for years: de-escalating situations caused by men, with the burden of minimising incidents being placed squarely on our shoulders.

Occurrences could be as mundane as a street catcall, as infuriating as a sexist comment at work, or as

Chris has an epiphany.

… Read the rest

CNN reported last month:

A United Nations official is headed to the Central African Republic after reports that over 100 women, girls and boys were raped and abused — many by U.N. peacekeepers.

Jane Holl Lute, a senior U.N. official tasked with leading efforts to curb peacekeeper abuse, was en route to the country Wednesday, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said.

Allegations of sexual abuse by foreign and local forces have plagued the Central African Republic since the United Nations sent forces to the country two years ago. But they’re still just as shocking as ever.

…

[M]ore than 100 victims said they were sexually abused by U.N. peacekeepers and non-U.N. forces, a U.N. official said Tuesday.

“Tragically, the vast

It’s not always possible to do everything at once. You patch the leak in one place and it pops up in another.

Like trying to figure out this matter of “gender identity” for instance, and how it coheres with nondiscrimination on the basis of sex.

The Obama administration is planning to issue a sweeping directive telling every public school district in the country to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity.

I’m leaning toward doing away with the whole sex segregation thing when it comes to restrooms and just having neutral rooms with floor-to-ceiling stalls. Privacy for all, and no need to fret about who is what.

Also, HB2 sucks.

But “gender identity” is a … Read the rest

Shaheen Hashmat in the New Statesman on police failures to do anything about “honour” violence.

A review carried out in 2015 by HMIC into the effectiveness of police responses to “honour”-based violence (HBV) found that only three out of the 43 forces across England and Wales are prepared in all essential areas to deal with such crimes. Ten years on from the horrific murder of Banaz Mahmod, who approached the police no less than five times before she was brutally raped, murdered and buried in a back garden in Birmingham, it’s clear that lessons still haven’t been learned.

She says the necessary expertise is no longer an issue.

Detective Sergeant Pal Singh has worked on some of the

A talk next week at Coventry Skeptics in the Pub: Blame the Brain: How Neurononsense joined Psychobabble to Keep Women in Their Place.

Gina Rippon

Wednesday, May 18 at 7:30PM

Twisted Barrel Ale Brewery and Tap House
Unit 5,
Fargo Village,
Far Gosford Street,
Coventry,
CV1 5ED

There is a long history of debate about biological sex differences and their part in determining gender roles, with the ‘biology is destiny’ mantra being used to legitimise imbalances in these roles. The tradition is continuing, with new brain imaging techniques being hailed as sources of evidence of the ‘essential’ differences between men and women, and the concept of ‘hardwiring’ sneaking into popular parlance as a brain-based explanation for all kinds of

To the surprise of no one, Saudi Arabia uses armored vehicles against its own people, the Globe and Mail reports.

Footage analyzed by The Globe and Mail shows Saudi Arabia using armoured vehicles against minority Shia Muslim dissidents in the Mideast country’s Eastern Province, raising serious questions about Riyadh’s tendency to use these military goods against its own citizens.

Copies of the videos, which date from 2012 and 2015, were supplied by Saudi human-rights activists who want Canada to suspend shipments of combat vehicles to Riyadh in a $15-billion deal between Canada and the ruling House of Saud.

The Trudeau government in April approved export permits for the bulk of these vehicle shipments in what Ottawa calls the largest

Another one:

A Sufi Muslim leader has been found hacked to death in Bangladesh in a suspected Islamist killing, police said Saturday, two weeks after the Islamic State group claimed the murder of a liberal professor in the same northwestern district.

Mohammad Shahidullah, 65, had been missing since leaving home on Friday morning before villagers last night found his body in a pool of blood in a mango grove in Rajshahi.

This time it’s a religious person rather than an atheist person, but if it is another Islamist killing, it’s pretty much the same thing – religious fanatics hacking to death anyone who isn’t a religious fanatic in exactly the way they are.

It comes amid a troubling rise

Yesterday on Fresh Air Nancy Fishman, a project director at the Vera Institute, told us about the mess that is the jail system in the US. I knew bits and pieces of what she said but not all of them and not the totality they make.

According to a report by the Vera Institute for Justice, there are more than 3,000 local jails in America, holding more than 730,000 people on any given day. Nancy Fishman, a project director at the Vera Institute, tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that jails “have impacted a huge number of Americans … many more than are impacted by state prisons.”

The Vera Institute’s report documents that there are almost 12 million admissions

This is a bit of gender-enforcement that I hadn’t heard of before – “gender reveal” ceremonies. Say what?

Slate writer Jessica Winter has a toddler, and stranger’s get worked up about her Gender Status.

“Why do you dress her like a boy?” demanded a man in the jewelry section of H&M while my kid—in a red sweatshirt, jeans, and gray-and-purple sneakers—rummaged through a pile of tassled earrings. The man was trying to be polite, but he also seemed affronted by his own confusion—and affronted by me, I suppose, for causing his confusion. “She looks like a boy!” he insisted, repeatedly. The only response I could think of was the shrugging one I gave: “She looks like herself.”

Girls and … Read the rest