Guess what: porn has a bad effect on teenage boys’ ideas about sex.

High school rapists are so influenced by pornography and so lacking in sex education, they think their victims’ tears are “part of foreplay,” says Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism campaign.

Bates shared this shocking finding at the Edinburgh Book Festival, as she warned of an epidemic of sexual assault in British schoolyards — where a rape a day occurs during term time. In the three years to 2015, 600 rapes in U.K. schools were reported to police, according to the Times of London.

Due to schools’ lack of sufficient policies for dealing with the problem, victims of assault are then being returned to classrooms

Planned Parenthood on Facebook:

It’s common to have a wide range of feelings after an abortion. Some people may feel anger, regret, guilt, or sadness, but many ultimately feel relief. And the truth is that most people who have an abortion don’t regret it.

Women. The word is women. Women have abortions. Men do not. Generic “people” do not. Women do. This refusal to say the word “women” has got to stop.

That guy to the left of the purple caption? That’s a guy. He didn’t have an abortion, so he can’t regret his abortion, because he didn’t have one. He’s not part of the class of people who can need abortions, because he’s not part of the … Read the rest

Kate Long read some T shirts.

https://twitter.com/volewriter/status/1029020130431434755

What did she find?

T shirts in the boys’ section (and those things are always labeled, so it’s not as if all kids can just grab unisex T shirts just because hey they are T SHIRTS) with

LIKE A BOSS

LEGEND

FEARLESS

BREAK THE RULES

TOTALLY AWESOME

NO RULES

EPIC SUPER

30% DUDE 20% EPIC

And in the girls’ section

DANCE DANCE DANCE

SPARKLE

sparkle always smile often dream big

SELFIES WIFI UNICORNS SPARKLE

STYLE BE WHO YOU WANT TO BE NEW YORK LONDON MILAN PARIS

MAKE TODAY BEAUTIFUL

make your dreams happen

FASHION ICON

love love love

shimmer

little LOVE

HAPPY

[a cartoon unicorn]

YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL

DREAMING OF Y♥U

Now … Read the rest

Speaking of mammoths…

The Far Corner Cafe

Mammoth undertaking.… Read the rest

Guest post by Josh Slocum.

The biggest blow patriarchy has dealt to women has been successfully convincing women that the domains of reason, logic, and analysis are oppression. That these are not faculties of women. That they are not reliable ways of navigating the world.

This is how patriarchy—as a system with women as active collaborators along with men—has stolen power from women in recent history. Removing from women the natural, objective ability to see the truth, speak it, and to be treated as one who has spoken the truth.

Many women take it and run, retreating into mysticism and renouncing the notions of logic, cause and effect, and objectivity as “male violence” imposed from the outside. Many speak … Read the rest

The Post on Trump’s NDAs.

When you make a reality TV star the president, you’re going to get a reality show White House. And when that reality TV star is Donald Trump, the reality show will have a particular character, one in which amid all the chaos and backstabbing is a cult of personality that takes precedence over any conception of public service or public good.

It’s too bad it’s that reality show, too. If it had been a cooking show we could have had Lidia Bastianich as Secretary of State.

But about this Omarosa book.

While much of the attention is focused on all the interpersonal nastiness and allegations of things such as the president being on tape using

This is nice.

… Read the rest

The Trump administration has a fabulous new plan for making the air more healthy to breathe: it’s done by redefining what is unhealthy.

A story published Monday in environmental policy outlet E&E News details the evidence. “After decades of increasingly strong assertions that there is no known safe level of fine particle exposure for the American public, [the] EPA under the Trump administration is now considering taking a new position,” reporter Niina Heikkinen wrote. “The agency is floating the idea of changing its rulemaking process and setting a threshold level of fine particles that it would consider safe.” (She’s referring to particulate matter that is 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter, small enough to penetrate deep into the circulatory

Stephen Miller has an uncle who is not proud of his nephew. Brendan Smialowski tells a story of a Jewish family that left a shtetl in Belarus to escape pogroms and conscription in the Czar’s army, and went to you guessed it the USofA in 1903. One branch settled in the Pennsylvania coal country.

The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people

Karen Attiah on why it’s not a brilliant plan for NPR to invite professional racists on to make their pitch.

Ahead of the one-year anniversary of Charlottesville, NPR decided to give an on-air lesson on the proper care and feeding of white nationalists and neo-Nazi ideology.

On Friday’s Morning Edition, NPR’s Noel King interviewed Jason Kessler, the organizer of Sunday’s Unite the Right 2 rally in Washington. There were a lot of troubling spots in the soft-focus mess of interview, but perhaps the most stunning was when King asked Kessler what he believes about the differences between races. Kessler proceeded to literally rank various races on the basis of debunked bell-curve myths about intelligence differences between groups on national public

Aw yeah – white nationalists threw a rally and nobody showed up.

Almost nobody. It was a pathetic dud.

A year after the race-fueled violence in Charlottesville, Va., a small group of white nationalists marched through downtown Washington on Sunday on their way to a rally in front of the White House.

It was over almost as soon as it began.

The white supremacists were met along their march route and at the rally site by thousands of counterdemonstrators denouncing racism and white supremacy. The white nationalists, who numbered about two dozen, stayed in Lafayette Square, a park just north of the White House, for a short time and left before 6 p.m.

They had been scheduled to hold

Zowie.

Archaeologist Ticia Verveer on Facebook:

This beautiful tiny woolly mammoth figure, measuring just 3.7 cm long and weighing a mere 7.5 grams, was skilfully carved with a flint tool ca. 35,000 years ago. It was found at the site of the Vogelherd Cave in southwestern Germany.

Thirty five THOUSAND years ago.… Read the rest

Oh now look, this is just unfair to poor Mr Trump.

Kellyanne Conway, the chief counselor to President Donald Trump, had difficulty on Sunday naming the top black aide working in the White House following the firing of former “Apprentice” contestant Omarosa Manigault Newman late last year.

…

Conway, asked on ABC’s “This Week” who would now rank as the highest-level black among personnel stationed in the West Wing, initially faulted host John Karl for not focusing on Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson. “The president works with the secretary every day,” she said.

The former renowned neurosurgeon, however, does not physically work or advise the president from an office in the White House.

Working in … Read the rest

Iram Ramzan has a piece in the Sunday Times reminding us that criticizing the niqab is something a great many Muslims do, so we’re not automatically being More Virtuous by defending it as A Woman’s Choice.

I was surprised at the furore last week when Boris Johnson wrote that Muslim women who wear the face veil “look like letter boxes” and compared them to bank robbers. Quite rightly, he doesn’t think we should ban the niqab in all public places, as Denmark has done, but described them as “absolutely ridiculous”.

There are many Muslims — including many of my relatives — who hate the niqab and what it stands for, and will use much worse language than “letter box”

Oh look at that now. Remember Gregor Murray? The Dundee councillor who “identifies as gender non-binary”? And had to apologize last month for calling some women “utter cunts”?

Not the first time he’s had to apologize. Pink News back in May 2014:

The former chair of the Scottish National Party’s LGBT group has attacked First Minister Alex Salmond’s plan for a 40% female quota in boardrooms.

SNP Councillor Gregor Murray, the deputy convener of education on Dundee City Council, was previously convener of the SNP’s LGBT group, Out for Independence, when it was still an unofficial organisation within the SNP.

The Herald reports Cllr Murray wrote on Facebook that the quota was “the biggest load of piss I have

Suspiciously…erm…foreign people are being denied visas for the Edinburgh book festival, because you can’t be too careful with…erm…foreign people. Certain kinds of foreign people that is. Foreign people from Norway are fine, but people who are not quite so…erm…northern are not entirely welcome.

A dozen authors who were planning to attend this year’s Edinburgh international book festival have had their visas refused, according to the director, Nick Barley, who warned that the “humiliating” application process would deter artists from visiting the UK.

The festival, which starts on Saturday and includes appearances from 900 authors and illustrators from 55 countries, routinely provides assistance for visa applications. It has reported a jump in refusals over the last few years.