Well at least President Shithole has canceled his trip to the UK, knowing how much they hate him over there.

Donald Trump has shelved plans to open the new US embassy in London next month, according to reports.

Concerned about the welcome he would receive in the UK, the President is understood to be sending US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson instead.

…

Mr Trump had been due to come to London to open the new £750m embassy, but was said to have abandoned the idea as he feels unhappy about the scale of the visit and the arrangements made.

He is said to be unhappy about the lack of “bells and whistles” surrounding the event and the fact he would not be able to meet the Queen.

Good good good good. More of that. He needs to understand that everybody hates him and that it’s because he’s so poisonous and awful. Normally I don’t wish that on people, but he’s an outlier.

The disgust-horror at menstrual blood kills another woman.

KATHMANDU, Nepal — The last time anyone saw Gauri Kumari Bayak alive, she was gathering grass and firewood. Considered impure because she was menstruating, she was about to sleep outside in a cold hut.

She never woke up.

According to the police, Ms. Bayak is the latest victim of a very old tradition in rural Nepal, in which religious Hindus believe that menstruating women are unclean and should be banished from the family home. She was found dead on Monday, apparently having asphyxiated after building a small fire inside the hut to keep warm.

Get outside, woman, with your disgusting shedding of the endometrium that is every human being’s first source of nourishment and survival. Get outside into the cold. We’ll stay in here where it’s warm but you have to go out into the cold because you have that kind of body that can grow a human and then push it out into the world. Get out.

In Nepal, one of Asia’s poorest countries, dozens of women and girls have died in recent years from following this tradition, despite activists’ campaigns and government efforts to end the practice.

Menstruating women often trudge outside at night to bed down with cows or goats in tiny, rough, grass-roofed huts and sheds. Many have been raped by intruders or died from exposure to the elements.

But at least their icky blood was out of the house.

The government of Nepal is taking steps to make it illegal to force menstruating women outside, but they’re going slowly.

All of this, of course, was too late for Ms. Bayak, 22, who has been described as a talented, highly motivated young woman. Her family said she had been teaching illiterate women to read while finishing her own high school degree, and sewing dresses at night.

No more high school, no more teaching other women, because now she’s dead…because she menstruated.

Radha Paudel, a Nepali women’s rights activist, was struck by the fact that Ms. Bayak’s family was relatively educated and well off.

“This is what makes me upset,” Ms. Paudel said. “Even people who consider themselves very sophisticated, very educated, very cultured, they are still doing this, because of religion.”

The practice is called chhaupadi, which in the Nepali language means something like “tree omen.” The vast majority of Nepal’s population is Hindu, and in ancient Hindu culture, menstruating women were considered toxic — if they entered a temple, they polluted it; if they handled the family’s food, everyone would become sick; if they touched a tree, that tree would never bear fruit.

Screw ancient Hindu culture. Get over it.

Last summer, another young woman died while following the chhaupadi ritual. That woman had been banished to a small hut where she was bitten by a poisonous snake.

“What this is, is segregation,” said Ms. Paudel, the activist. “And we as a society don’t talk enough about it. We don’t talk about dignity, we don’t talk about women’s rights.”

Adam Zyglis

Robert Reich offers some optimism (and a way to make a difference for those of us in the US):

Every time I post about another outrage perpetrated by Trump and his enablers, several of you ask “What can I do?” The answer is to do what hundreds of thousands are already doing – join with others in Indivisible groups to “kick the bums out,” as the old saying goes.

It’s working. Yesterday, one of the most right-wing members of Congress, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA 49), announced he will not seek reelection. Issa is the second California Republican to retire this week. He joins a growing list of GOP House retirements.

One reason for Issa’s – and the other GOP retirements – is the work of Indivisible groups. Indivisible groups in San Diego showed up to Issa’s office 49 weeks in a row with an average of 370 constituents each week, to let him know what an awful job he was doing and how strong the opposition wold be to his reelection. (Yesterday, Indivisible San Diego and other groups from their district held a retirement party for Issa.)

A wave of Republican retirements will help take the big, blue wave across America on Election Day, November 6, 2018, replacing people who don’t represent what’s best about America with those who do – diverse, progressive, local leaders.

So, in the midst of all the gloom and outrage, please know that America is rallying – and please get back to work to take back the House and hopefully the Senate as well. Get involved with your local Indivisible group, register to vote, and read up on how we’ll hold our MoCs accountable for their vote on the #TrumpTaxScam.

More on that arrest of a teacher who objected to a pay raise for an administrator.

Deyshia Hargrave previously spoke out against the Vermilion Parish School Board (VPSB) for voting to give the standing superintendent nearly $30,000 raise, which she claimed was a “slap in the face” to hard-working teachers who haven’t seen a boost in pay in years.

…

Since those in attendance at Monday’s board meeting were allowed to comment on superintendent Jerome Puyau’s pay raise, Hargrave chose to make mention of the “serious issue” she had with such action occurring.

“I have a serious issue with a superintendent or any person in a position of leadership getting any type of raise,” Hargrave said before the board and others in attendance. “I feel like it’s a slap in the face to all the teachers, cafeteria workers and any other support staff we have. We work very hard with very little to maintain the salaries we have.”

Hargrave also questioned Puyau directly on why he was willing to essentially take a pay hike that would affect the salaries of Vermilion Parish teachers, to which a school board member claimed her comments weren’t “germane to what’s on the agenda.” Hargrave continued to press the board members further, but she was eventually escorted out of the meeting by an officer on site.

And then the officer on site handcuffed her for no apparent reason, not to mention pushing her to the floor.

But the board still thinks she had it coming.

“Everybody wants to side on the poor little woman who got thrown out,” Anthony Fontana, the VPSB president, said to WAFB. “Well, she made a choice. She could have walked out and nothing would have happened.”

Erm. She made a choice to ask the school board questions at a public hearing. Is there some compelling reason she should be forbidden to do that, and roughly arrested if she does do it? A member of the board said her question was not germane to their agenda, but it’s far from clear why it wasn’t.

It’s true that people can always make a choice to avoid asking troublesome questions in order to avoid being roughed up, but that shouldn’t be necessary in a free society.

Mei Fong asks how much more are men paid.

About 50 percent, in the BBC journalist Carrie Gracie’s case. Over the weekend, Ms. Gracie quit as the broadcaster’s China editor and announced she was returning to London. “Enough is enough,” she wrote, in an astringent open letter, describing how she discovered last year that the BBC paid two of its four international editors — men, of course — 50 percent more than the female editors.

(I think it was closer to twice as much.)

It says something when it’s considered an advancement for women just to get to the bargaining table and ask for equal pay. Many of us never even get that far.

More than a decade ago, I was coming off a successful summer stint as a Wall Street Journal reporting intern. Naturally, I vied with other interns for a full-time reporting job. A post came up in the Hong Kong bureau. Did I, a Cantonese speaker with prior Asian reporting experience, get it? I wasn’t even asked to apply. Instead, a fellow intern with no prior Asia experience was hired. He was white.

There were no doubt other variables, but still that seems odd.

Last year, the Independent Association of Publishers’ Employees reported a persistent wage gap between men and women employed by Dow Jones, The Journal’s parent company. The report found that full-time female employees make on average less than 85 percent of what their male counterparts earn, even when accounting for differences in age and location. And there is a distinct and persistent gap between pay for men and for women, even when they hold the same job title and have worked the same amount of time. Dow Jones female employees in New York — hardly a cheap place to live — made $10,000 less than their male counterparts, and $13,000 less in Washington. Multiply that difference over the span of a career and that’s the home you can never buy, or several children’s college educations.

Ok but on the plus side, you get lots of sexual invitations on the job.

Our understanding of China would be hugely diminished without the contribution of many outstanding female correspondents. There was The New Yorker’s China correspondent Emily Hahn, who wrote the first authoritative biography of the Soong sisters and had met both Mao and Zhou Enlai. (She frequently complained in letters home of being underpaid and financially strapped.) Or Time magazine’s Annalee Jacoby, who had to work around the War Department’s rules forbidding female correspondents. Rather patronizingly called the “girl reporter of this war” during World War II, she co-wrote the best seller “Thunder Out of China,” chronicling the Chiang Kai-shek era. Ms. Jacoby would later give up her foreign correspondent career for marriage and motherhood.

The case for equal pay is the case for better reporting. Pay women equally to men and more women will stay in the business; more women lessens the preponderance of male viewpoints and allows a clearer presentation of how things are. Certainly female reporters who covered the Vietnam War have made the case that their gender frequently helped them look beyond a near-fetishistic coverage of guns and bombs to the real costs of war.

To put it another way, it would be quite a good idea to get the whole human story and not just half of it.

There’s that teacher in Louisiana who was arrested and handcuffed for asking questions at a school board meeting about why an administrator was getting a raise while teachers hadn’t had a raise in years.

Deyshia Hargrave had a question for the Vermillion Parish School Board: Why was the superintendent getting a pay raise when teachers like her and other school employees hadn’t had one in years?

“I feel like it is a slap in the face of all the teachers, cafeteria workers and any other support staff we have,” she told the board in a public meeting Monday. “We work very hard with very little.”

What happened next might have stayed in the tiny Louisiana town of Abbeville, about 150 miles west of New Orleans. But captured on videotape and viewed nearly 2 million times on YouTube, it became an international incident. The school board reportedly received death threats from around the world, as local parents and teachers planned their own protests.

A little girl in Pakistan was raped, strangled, and thrown into a dumpster. She was seven.

As her relatives tell it, Zainab’s horrifying last few hours unfolded like this: The child had been staying with her aunt while her parents traveled to Saudi Arabia to perform the umrah pilgrimage. On Thursday, relatives say, she left home for a nearby Koran recital. She never returned.

On Tuesday, police found her body in a dumpster about a mile from her home in Kasur, a city in Punjab province. According to early autopsy reports, Zainab had been raped multiple times and strangled four or five days earlier.

She was seven. Seven. Seven.

The condemnable & horrific rape & murder of little Zainab exposes once again how vulnerable our children are in our society. This is not the first time such horrific acts have happened. We have to act swiftly to punish the guilty & ensure that our children are better protected. pic.twitter.com/9f7OM3hYT1

— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) January 10, 2018

Zainab’s case, though, seems to have hit a nerve, prompting attention from politicians, athletes and performers. On Wednesday, riots erupted over alleged inaction by authorities. At least two people were fatally shot when protesters tried to storm a police station to demand justice, according to Dawn. Shop owners in the city shut their doors on Wednesday in solidarity with Zainab’s family.

In Pakistan, rape and violence against women are endemic. Sometimes, they’re even sanctioned by traditional authorities. In Pakistan, tribal councils have come under fire for ordering the rape of women whose relatives commit crimes. In July, a 12-year-old girl was raped by a teenager in a field. Two days later, the perpetrator’s 16-year-old sister was sexually assaulted as punishment. Although it’s hard to know how often this happens, experts estimate that hundreds of women suffer this fate each year.

God hates women, everybody hates women.

Another example of how not to amplify support for your cause: Pensacola Women’s March on Facebook:

Trigger Warning and Content Warning for comments:
Transphobia, Cissexism, Racism, mention of Sexual Assault, Genital Mutilation, Misogyny and Trans-Misogyny.

The Pink P*ssy Hats represent a very concentrated and thus, exclusionary sect of feminism that ignores, neglects, and ultimately harms the fight for global women’s liberation. The entire concept is based around the idea of biological essentialism and shared womanhood (Mia McKenzie, Black Girl Dangerous): two incorrect ideas that women are all on the same level despite conflicting classes, races, sexualities, etc. and are also bound by “the power of the vagina”. This is a very popular concept developed and expanded upon during the second wave of feminism, usually called “radical feminism”. This type of feminism, though hugely successful in terms of reproductive justice, ultimately emphasized a mistreatment of transgender women that continues today. Though some transgender women do choose to have Genital Reconstruction Surgery, many do not, and should not have to to prove their being a woman. The right to self-determination, a concept that all feminists must get behind, allows transgender women to be women. Thus, not every woman has a vagina, and with the right to self-determination existing for transgender men and non-binary transgender people as well, not every person who has a vagina is a woman. The Pink P*ssy Hat reinforces the notion that woman = vagina and vagina = woman, and both of these are incorrect. Additionally, the Pink P*ssy Hat is white-focused and Eurocentric in that it assumes that all vaginas are pink; this is also an incorrect assertion.

The Pensacola Women’s March organizers understand that this idea was a knee-jerk reaction to the heinous, sexist, misogynistic Trump administration, but it is also just that: a knee-jerk reaction, not fully thought out. Therefore, we ask that march goers refrain from wearing this hat and instead, pick an alternative headwear that focuses on collective women’s liberation for ALL women: transgender women, multinational women, disabled women, queer women — the most marginalized. It is only through the centering and leadership of these groups that women will be liberated — not through exclusionary white feminism, which the Pink P*ssy Hat is indicative of.

The Pensacola Women’s March team will be removing all forms of hate speech that they encounter in an effort to promote a safer environment for all women.

Let’s discuss that. The idea appears to be that feminism made a big mistake from the outset by…well, by being feminism: by seeing women as an oppressed class and working to end that oppression.

There’s a lot that’s strange about that idea. To pick out just one – why is it only feminism that is accused of this? Why are other oppressed classes allowed to name their oppression and their class while women are told that’s “mistreatment”?

To pick out another – how can women organize to end their oppression if they can’t name themselves?

To pick out a third – this claim that feminists think women are ‘bound by “the power of the vagina”’ is nonsense. There’s some rhetoric about pussy power and so on, but that’s because of entrenched fear and loathing that is entangled with misogyny and male supremacy and all the rest of it; it’s not a literal belief in “the power of the vagina.” Again, feminists should not be ordered to stop using rhetoric to counter fear and loathing.

Updating to add: A trans friend of mine left this comment on the post:

This was anti trump protest in the most graphic way possible on television. I can’t see how anybody who is against his illegal reign would be offended . Only thing I can conclude is some these folks allegedly opposed to pink hats are agents of a GOP fifth column. When the right wants to wreck something , what better than to set it up to look like an attack from the left. Nixon used those tactics too.

I think that’s all too plausible.

Bien sûr, c’est normal. There are Christina Hoff Sommerses and Ella Whelans in France too, and they join their anglophone sisters in saying this has gone too far.

Just one day after Hollywood offered a show of support for the #MeToo movement on the Golden Globes red carpet and stage, a famous actress on the other side of the Atlantic lent her name to a public letter denouncing the movement, as well as its French counterpart, #Balancetonporc, or “Expose Your Pig.”

Catherine Deneuve joined more than 100 other Frenchwomen in entertainment, publishing and academic fields Tuesday in the pages of the newspaper Le Monde and on its website in arguing that the two movements, in which women and men have used social media as a forum to describe sexual misconduct, have gone too far by publicly prosecuting private experiences and have created a totalitarian climate.

“Rape is a crime. But insistent or clumsy flirting is not a crime, nor is gallantry a chauvinist aggression,” the letter, dated Monday, begins.

But the claim is not that “insistent flirting” is [necessarily] a crime, but rather that it’s one branch of the systemic subordination of women, that it hampers women at work, that it violates workplace rules, that it’s a form of bullying, and so on. The idea isn’t that all the harassing men should be thrown into prison, it’s that the harassing should stop.

(Also, “gallantry” – give me a break.)

“As a result of the Weinstein affair, there has been a legitimate realization of the sexual violence women experience, particularly in the workplace, where some men abuse their power. It was necessary. But now this liberation of speech has been turned on its head.”

They contend that the #MeToo movement has led to a campaign of public accusations that have placed undeserving people in the same category as sex offenders without giving them a chance to defend themselves. “This expedited justice already has its victims, men prevented from practicing their profession as punishment, forced to resign, etc., while the only thing they did wrong was touching a knee, trying to steal a kiss, or speaking about ‘intimate’ things at a work dinner, or sending messages with sexual connotations to a woman whose feelings were not mutual,” they write. The letter, written in French was translated here by The New York Times.

The only thing they did wrong was treat work colleagues who had the bad luck to be women as if they were merchandise laid out on a shelf for consumption. It’s several decades too late to pretend that men just have no idea that women at work want to be treated as colleagues rather than sexual opportunities.

They believe that the scope of the two movements represses sexual expression and freedom…

They continue, “The philosopher Ruwen Ogien defended the freedom to offend as essential to artistic creation. In the same way, we defend a freedom to bother, indispensable to sexual freedom.” Though the writers do not draw clear lines between what constitutes sexual misconduct and what does not, they say that they are “sufficiently farseeing not to confuse a clumsy come-on and sexual assault.”

But #MeToo doesn’t confuse a clumsy come-on and sexual assault either. It’s entirely possible to say both: an unwanted sexual overture is not assault, and an unwanted sexual overture is out of place in a work environment. A thing can be bad without being a crime; we can call things bad without thereby saying or implying they are crimes. I don’t think anyone has called for Charlie Rose or Leon Wieseltier to be prosecuted. That doesn’t mean what they did was harmless.

In concluding the letter, the writers return to the concept of self-victimization and a call for women to accept the pitfalls that come with freedom. “Accidents that can affect a woman’s body do not necessarily affect her dignity and must not, as hard as they can be, necessarily make her a perpetual victim,” they write. “Because we are not reducible to our bodies. Our inner freedom is inviolable. And this freedom that we cherish is not without risks and responsibilities.”

Dear god. That’s truly sad. That’s what people tell themselves in concentration camps – “my inner freedom is inviolable.” Women don’t have to put up with accidents that can affect their bodies; women are allowed to say no, stop treating us as if we were there for your sexual coffee break.