I find this intensely annoying.

Today we remember a great man and his work. We read his sermons. We recall his sacrifices. We give back. In doing these things, we raise our gaze and renew the spirit in which we serve one another. Such is the calling of #MLKDay. pic.twitter.com/UpNNtZJ8n5

— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) January 15, 2018

Today we remember a great man and his work. We read his sermons. We recall his sacrifices. We give back. In doing these things, we raise our gaze and renew the spirit in which we serve one another. Such is the calling of #MLKDay

It’s completely empty. He could be talking about anyone. “His work” could be anything. “His sermons” could preach … Read the rest

A meaningful Martin Luther King day to you.

"My Brothers Keeper" by Watson Mere. #MLKNOW #martinlutherkingday #MLKDAY #MartinLutherKing pic.twitter.com/aMA58XOVie

— Mere (@ArtOfMere_) January 16, 2017

Watson Mere is a Haitian artist, which makes this all the more fitting.… Read the rest

Suzanne Moore has thoughts on BBC blokeyness. She doesn’t enjoy being a guest on the Today show so that she can have John Humphrys barking at her about abortion.

Surely no one was surprised by the audio that leaked last week, revealing Humphrys’ fossilised attitude to the concept of equal pay. The programme has long been an old boys’ club, absolutely Westminster- and London-centric, and it ventures into many areas – science, culture, the internet, the north and, er, women – with a supercilious attitude.

But it’s more than that, it’s also Both Sides bollocks.

Meanwhile, Humphrys continues to “banter” away in the studio. This is 2018. Do we even have to argue about the right to equal

John Humphrys, host of BBC Radio 4’s Today, apparently thinks Carrie Gracie has a hell of a nerve expecting to be paid as much as her male colleagues.

In a leaked conversation recorded before [last] Monday’s programme, Humphrys and the BBC’s North America editor Jon Sopel discuss Carrie Gracie’s comments on the gender pay gap following her resignation as the broadcaster’s China editor on Sunday.

Gracie announced she was resigning from the post in an open letter that was published on her website. She said she was quitting her post after learning that male colleagues, including Sopel, were earning significantly more than her for roles of the same seniority.

Sopel is the one who makes nearly twice as much as … Read the rest

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in the Telegraph offers another Oh no sex will die piece. She’s one of the hundred women who signed the open letter in Le Monde.

She had found the exposure of Harvey Weinstein liberating at first.

I had applauded Ronan Farrow’s superb New Yorker magazine report on the 13 women whose lives and careers had been blighted by Weinstein. I was unsurprised when investigations revealed that other Hollywood moguls had updated the casting couch tradition. In his inimitable style, US President Donald “grab-them-by-the-p….” Trump had given voice to the crass fantasies of a thousand men in positions of power.

At the time of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in New York, I was among the first Frenchwomen to

Originally a comment by iknklast on The amount of labor women do each day.

replaced by puritanism

I so hate this trope…In a puritan world, women were often regarded as belonging to men, and they didn’t have a lot of say in who, when, or where they married. They were not given the option of refusing their husband once married to the person their parents approved. They were not allowed the sexual freedom to make their own sexual choices – in short, they were not allowed to say “yes”.

This is the opposite – the extreme opposite – of what the #MeToo and other feminist anti-groping crusaders are wanting. What most of us want is the ability to say … Read the rest

The thing about sexual harassment is that it makes a lot of extra work for women, and that’s

• not fair
• another obstacle that women face but men don’t

Sara Maurer at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

[T]he #MeToo movement has made visible the amount of labor women do each day when they show up at work and redirect the conversation away from their bra size, tactfully pull hands off their body, or repeatedly find new ways to avoid the male supervisor who wants to discuss his sexual problems. That’s work. We don’t get paid for it, we don’t get credit for it, and we don’t want to do it.

We also don’t want advancement at work to depend on

A beautiful riposte:

A New York bookstore is featuring books today by writers from #ShitholeCountries including Nelson Mandela and Malala Yousafzai pic.twitter.com/CrQa5oFSoY

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) January 13, 2018

… Read the rest

Jezebel posts a laughably wrong bad inaccurate headline:

The Backlash to #MeToo Is Second-Wave Feminism

You what? The hell it is. #MeToo is second wave feminism, and the backlash is third wave. Mind you I think all the waves are stupid because none of it is that simple – the resurgence of feminism starting in the late 60s was hardly monolithic. However if you’re going to talk about waves at all you should at least get them right, and second wave was a lot more radical than its predecessors; that was the whole point. Noticing and pushing back against sexual harassment was part of that. (Lately I’ve seen claims that no one had even heard of it until the Clarence … Read the rest

Speaking of immigrants, speaking of immigrants from African countries, speaking of immigrants from what Donald Trump is pleased to call “shitholes” – news outlets today are talking about Emmanuel Mensah, who came to New York from Ghana.

The Times did a story on him on December 29th.

Emmanuel Mensah was a handsome, strongly built young man in his late 20s who immigrated to the Bronx from Ghana five years ago. He joined the Army National Guard but returned to his apartment on Prospect Avenue in December, after graduating from boot camp with the rank of private first class.

And on Thursday night, he lost his life trying to save people from his furiously burning apartment building, one of 12