mohandasgandhi:

stfurapeculture:

I amended the title up there because it was actually incorrect. One in 5 women in this study reported rape. A far greater number reported sexual assault that did not meet the study’s definition of rape. Actual report is here if anyone wants to check it out. It should also be noted this was a telephone survey that only included people 18 and older. Given the high number of victims who are under the age of 18, we can’t view these stats as exhaustive. But they’re important to note anyway.

The study defined rape as “any completed or attempted unwanted vaginal (for women), oral, or anal penetration through the use of physical force (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threats to physically harm and includes times when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.” The numbers for men were 1 in 71 reporting rape.

The study also captured:

• Sexual coercion (defined as ‘unwanted sexual penetration that occurs after a person is pressured in a nonphysical way’);
• Unwanted sexual contact (defined as unwanted sexual experiences involving touch but not sexual penetration, such as being kissed in a sexual way, or having sexual body parts fondled or grabbed); and
• Non-contact (defined as unwanted experiences that do not involve any touching or penetration, including someone exposing their sexual body parts, flashing, or masturbating in front of the victim, someone making a victim show his or her body parts, someone making a victim look at or participate in sexual photos or movies, or someone harassing the victim in a public place in a way that made the victim feel unsafe).

Once you consider what fell outside of the study’s definition of rape, nearly half of the women surveyed (44.6%) and 1 in 5 men (22.2%) reported experiencing sexual violence victimization other than rape at some point in their lives.

And who are the rapists?

More than half of female victims of rape (51.1%) reported that at least one perpetrator was a current or former intimate partner. Four out of 10 of female victims (40.8%) reported being raped by an acquaintance. Approximately 1 in 8 female victims (12.5%) reported being raped by a family member, and 2.5% by a person in a position of authority. About 1 in 7 female victims (13.8%) reported being raped by a stranger.

So, that’s less than 14% of rapes being committed by strangers. And we blame survivors for their rapes… why exactly?

This is important. Read this.

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HRC and Obama both don’t always live up to our ideals about what they should do. But they also both do a lot of good.

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heyfatchick:

Amber Riley in Badgley Mischka at the 2012 Golden Globe Awards

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jawdust:

Why you should love Elizabeth ‘Nellie Bly’ Cochrane

• Born in 1864/65, Elizabeth, one of 15 children, was always ‘the rebellious one’. Fierce as fuck from an early age, she testified against her abusive stepfather in her mother’s divorce trial.
• In 1880 she enrolled in a teacher-training college but had to leave after her first semester due to lack of funding - then moved to Pittsburgh to help run a goddamn boarding school. 
• This is where we get to the good shit. Age 18, she wrote a letter-to-the-editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch bitchslapping the everloving fuck out of a sexist ballsack of an article entitled ‘What Girls Are Good For’. 
• The editor was so goddamn wooed by her razor-sharp tongue that he RAN AN AD asking her to identify herself. Elizabeth owned up, and was hired instantaneously, her badassery radiating from her pores and intoxicating all within a twenty mile radius.
• Working under the pen-name Nellie Bly, Elizabeth kicked the butts of morons everywhere, writing articles aimed at social justice, particularly labour laws to protect working ‘girls’ and reform of Pennsylvania’s divorce law, which greatly favoured men.
• Not content with changing the world from behind her desk, Elizabeth became a founding mother of investigative journalism. She was expelled from Mexico for exposing political corruption, and henceforth wrapped in cotton wool by her editors. Infuriated by their mollycoddling, Lizzie left them a note essentially telling them to fuck themselves and hot footed it to NYC. She was still only 23.
• Within six months she was hired by Joseph fucking Pulitzer himself, and continued her batshit crazy investigations uninhibited. Her very first assingment had her feigning mental illness to expose repulsive conditions in Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum. Her cutting report was so fucking horrifying, compelling and persuasive that it triggered public and political action, leading to reform of the institution.
• In the next couple of years she had herself thrown in jail and hired by a sweatshop, all for shits and giggles. Oh, and to uncover incomprehensible injustice, cruelty, poverty, and the concealed, heinous treatment of the vulnerable and voiceless. 
• But was pioneering journalism, social revolution and batshit badassery enough for our Liz? Like fuck it was. On a whim Nellie did what any self-respecting 25 year old woman in the 1800s would do - she emulated Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and did it in 72.
• Millions followed her journey, and its appeal to a semi-literate populace resulted in greatly increased newspaper readership. So while travelling the entire globe (IN THE 1800s, AS A WOMAN) by ship, train, burro and balloon, she helped the world to read.
• Having essentially conquered the entire goddamn universe before hitting 30, Nellie retired, and wed 72 year old industrialist Robert Seaman. Their marriage was a happy one, and after his death she took over Iron Clad Manufacturing Co.
• But Lizzie was a writer, what would she know about the metal industry? Well, she INVENTED the steel barrel that became the model for the widely used 55-gallon drum and turned her inherited businesses into multimillion-dollar companies, so apparently a fuck ton.
• Furthermore, she set a precedent for working conditions, ensuring her workers had good pay, gymnasiums, staffed libraries, and health care, all completely unheard of at the time, while still writing to further the plight of the Suffragette movement.
• Nellie may have died age 58 of pneumonia, but HBICs live on forever.

Wow.

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