Barbara Kingsolver pulls no punches:

Patriarchy persists because power does not willingly cede its clout; and also, frankly, because women are widely complicit in the assumption that we’re separate and not quite equal. If we’re woke, we inspect ourselves and others for implicit racial bias, while mostly failing to recognise explicit gender bias, which still runs rampant. Religious faiths that subordinate women flourish on every continent. Nearly every American educational institution pours the lion’s share of its athletics budget into the one sport that still excludes women – American football.

Most progressives wouldn’t hesitate to attend a football game, or to praise the enlightened new pope – the one who says he’s sorry, but women still can’t lead

Guest post by Raymond Dickey.

There was a certain rich man who had a doctor, and an accusation was brought to him that this doctor was making him look bad. So he called him and said to him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of my physical, for you can no longer be my doctor.’

Then the doctor said within himself, ‘What shall I do? For my master is taking the position away from me. I cannot diagnose; I am ashamed to plug pharmaceuticals. I have resolved what to do, that when I am put out of medicine, they may receive me into their party.’

So he reviewed every one of his master’s medical measurements, … Read the rest

In other “pesky brown foreigners wanting to come here” news, it turns out you have to pass a test to be a humanist.

A Pakistani man who renounced his Muslim faith and became a humanist has had his application for asylum in the UK rejected after failing to correctly answer questions about ancient Greek philosophers.

The Home Office said Hamza bin Walayat’s failure to identify Plato and Aristotle as humanist philosophers indicated his knowledge of humanism was “rudimentary at best”.

Uh…what? Who says Plato and Aristotle even are humanist philosophers? Especially in any modern sense that an ex-Muslim would have in mind? Aristotle is a largely secular philosopher perhaps; Plato isn’t even that. They’re considered part of a broad … Read the rest

It looks as if Trump’s Fake News Awards aren’t today after all.

Trump will name “the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media” on Wednesday, according to a Jan. 7 tweet, but he appears to have done little preparation for the event — if there even is an event.

“We’ll keep you posted on any details around that potential event and what that would look like,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday when asked about the awards.

Posted? Potential? Would look like? But the awards are supposed to be today. Has he not prepared? No shopping for medals or tiny statues? No combing through the entries? No secret ballots?

What happened to the

The racism blowup isn’t going away.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Tuesday, while testifying under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee, that the president used “tough language” during a conversation on immigration policy in an Oval Office meeting last week. But Nielsen said she did not hear Trump describe some African countries and Haiti as “shithole countries,” as has been reported.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) found that impossible to believe. He preceded to express his frustration with why Nielsen — and Republican lawmakers Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) — seemed unable to recall what the president said in an Oval Office meeting.

Maybe they Repressed the Memory.

Booker also shared some of his recent

She’s not wrong.

This is worth 8 minutes of your time. @CoryBooker’s entire statement. pic.twitter.com/C4X9BHbg4X

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) January 16, 2018

… Read the rest

An anonymous woman who works at the BBC on being the collective BBC Women:

The plural, BBC Women, is the collective name we have given ourselves in choosing to highlight a very simple principle: equal pay for equal work. It is a matter of the law, the Equality Act of 2010.

And the group of BBC women I am a part of now numbers more than 200, including some of the most high-profile at the corporation. We are women who support our colleague Carrie Gracie in her public and eloquent pursuit of that principle of parity. Women who may have specific pay grievances or none, but, above all, have become involved in this issue because it is the right

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