The Everyday Sexism Project collects user-submitted reports from women to document their day-to-day experiences with normalized sexism, including sexual harassment and job discrimination. Entries can be submitted at the site, in an email to founder Laura Bates or to their
twitter account.
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posted by zarq
on Feb 20, 2013 -
200 comments
The status of Roma in Hungary has been brought into sharp focus with a controversial
article [link in Hungarian] by prominent ruling-party FIDESZ member, Zsolt Bayer, in which he says, "a significant part of the Roma are unfit for co-existence. They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals and they behave like animals." The Guardian
reports on the growing anger at the article,
The Hungarian Spectrum, and well-known poet and translator of Hungarian literature
George Szirtes weigh in with English translations of some of Bayer’s article. Many leading Hungarian politicians
condemn the article.
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posted by vac2003
on Jan 11, 2013 -
59 comments
The Myth of American Meritocracy. Ron Unz, former publisher of
The American Conservative, has challenged many of the magazine's
"paleocon" readers with several recent articles on ethnicity (including
His-Panic, which questioned links between immigration and crime, and
Race, IQ, and Wealth, with a skeptical eye toward that subject). But in his latest (long!) article,
The Myth of American Meritocracy, Unz will challenge many kinds of readers, as he makes the case for persistent, extensive ethnic discrimination in Ivy League admissions, which for decades, he argues, has been extremely biased in favor of under-qualified Jewish whites at the expense of well-qualified Asians and non-Jewish whites.
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posted by dgaicun
on Nov 28, 2012 -
80 comments
A woman wanting a mans-style hair-cut was
denied one by a Toronto barber because his religion forbids him from touching a woman he is not related to. The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario is expected to hear the issue if
mediation fails, as a
competing rights issue where there is a conflict between two individuals exercising their rights. The
OBA (warning, cheesy music autoplay) defends some Barbershops as a men's-only space tradition dating back to Ancient Greece, while others point to womens-only spaces like
spas that are allowed to continue to operate while discriminating against men.
posted by saucysault
on Nov 15, 2012 -
239 comments
Tainted: Why Gay Men Still Can't Donate Blood - "Since 1983, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines have disqualified men who have ever had sex with men (MSM) from donating blood... Uneven application of exclusion to at-risk individuals suggests that risk aversion disproportionately impacts MSMs. For example, a non-MSM individual who has had sexual contact with a commercial sex worker or HIV-positive partner is deferred for only twelve months... The fact that the U.S. upholds a lifetime ban on MSM donation while Australian policy allows MSM individuals to donate a year or less after contact reveals a glaring discrepancy. Both ethics and science point to a flaw in FDA policy. That I could have had sex with 365 partners this year and be a perfectly fine candidate for donating blood, while the MSM next to me wouldn't qualify, betrays a faulty line of logic."
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posted by flex
on Nov 12, 2012 -
104 comments
The Fifth Problem: "If this were a boxing match, with one of the boxers pressed in the corner, bloodied, desperately trying to hold his own against the barrage of punches falling on him (many of them below the belt, I might add), that would be the equivalent of the final, deadly, blow. The problem looked innocent enough at first glance: given a circle and two points on the plane outside the circle, construct another circle passing trough those two points and touching the first circle at one point."
Edward Frenkel, now Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, details the curiously baroque way Moscow State University chose to discriminate against talented Jewish math students: By quizzing them with
fiendishly difficult math problems with deceptively simple solutions that are nearly impossible to find.
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posted by flug
on Nov 5, 2012 -
41 comments
"I am here because when I was young, I wanted very badly to be a writer, I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I couldn’t find anyone like me in the world and it felt like my dreams were foreclosed simply because my gender was less typical than others."
On Saturday, Lana Wachowski (co-director of the "Matrix" franchise and "Cloud Atlas") received a "Visibility Award" from the Human Rights Campaign for her recent
decision to publicly come out as transgender. In a powerful 25-minute acceptance speech, Lana spoke about the pain she went through growing up and how she developed self-acceptance.
Video.
Transcript.
Q&A with the Hollywood Reporter.
posted by zarq
on Oct 24, 2012 -
76 comments
The Dealers is a new Israeli crime comedy, released here this weekend.
The poster features the film's central players sitting around a table loaded with booze, weed, bongs, joints and other drug paraphernalia. For the stricter populace of Jerusalem, a
modified version of the poster was prepared, one which removes all trace of...
You guessed it: Women.
The pot and booze? Untouched.
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posted by Silky Slim
on Jul 22, 2012 -
47 comments
When the Supreme Court decision
Loving v. Virginia in 1967 declared laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional, the last affected state in which a legal interracial marriage occurred was South Carolina in January, 1969, in the city where the Civil War started. What most people don't know is the
bride was a transsexual.
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posted by 23
on May 10, 2012 -
29 comments
In the state of Virginia, it is
now legal for licensed adoption agencies and foster facilities to discriminate on the basis of a potential parent's sexual orientation, religion, age, gender, disability, political beliefs, or family status.
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posted by roomthreeseventeen
on Dec 16, 2011 -
60 comments
Transgender Man Plays on Women's College Team. A guard for George Washington University's women's basketball team is a transgender man.
Kye Allums, who was born female and has not undergone any hormone treatments, changed his name from Kay-Kay to Kye within the last year and was relieved not to lose his scholarship. "When people refer to me as 'girl' or 'she,' it doesn't sit well with me," Allums said. "That feeling you get when someone pisses you off, that feeling you get when your stomach gets hot and it aches, that's what it feels like. And that's how I know I'm not supposed to be a girl." On Nov. 13, he will be the first transgender person to compete in Division One college basketball, according to
OutSports. Opposing fans used to taunt Allums about his masculine build, but it backfired. "I love it," he said. "It makes me feel better about myself to hear them call me a man."
posted by rcade
on Nov 2, 2010 -
187 comments
Judge Rules "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Is Unconstitutional - Judge Virginia A. Phillips of Federal District Court struck down President Clinton's
Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) policy in an
opinion (Scribd) issued late Thursday, ruling on the constitutionality of a complaint brought by the
Log Cabin Republicans (PDF). President Obama's Justice Department has until a September 23 deadline to submit objections to the court regarding Judge Phillips's permanent injunction, which is uncertain given Obama's previous support of his Department of Justice defending the legality of DADT, despite his opposition to DADT in principle.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Sep 9, 2010 -
91 comments
São Paulo Fashion Week, the nation’s most important fashion event, has been forced by local prosecutors to ensure that at least 10 percent of its models are of African or indigenous descent. The model scouts see it differently - it's all about what sells. "The goal" Brazilian model scouts say, "is to find the right genetic cocktail of German and Italian ancestry, perhaps with some Russian or other Slavic blood thrown in. Such a mix, they say, helps produce the tall, thin girls with straight hair, fair skin and light eyes that Brazil exports to the runways of New York, Milan and Paris with stunning success." Yet, "on the pages of its magazines, Brazil’s beauty spectrum is clearer. Nonwhite women, including celebrities of varying body types, are interspersed with white models. But on the runways, the proving ground for models hoping to go abroad, the diversity drops off precipitously."
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posted by VikingSword
on Jun 8, 2010 -
38 comments
Disabled traveler Rachel D. took a
harrowing flight with United recently. Despite their
stated policy, she was told repeatedly that "It's not in our contract to assist passengers with their luggage and we reserve the right to refuse assistance to anyone." This is
not the first time United has had a problem with disabled people. (For reference, the federal
Air Carrier Access Act that prohibits discrimination towards disabled passencers.)
posted by restless_nomad
on Apr 12, 2010 -
102 comments
The Donald Sterling Rule "Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling lives by his own rules. And the only one that matters, apparently, is this:
all bad deeds go unpunished. Over the last six years, nearly two dozen L.A. residents have sued Sterling for engaging in racist housing practices and Jim Crow-style bigotry. In a 2003 deposition, the 76-year-old real estate mogul admitted to paying a former employee to have sex with him in an elevator. Three years ago, the U.S. government charged him with "willful" mistreatment of African-American and Latino tenants, and earlier this month, he agreed to pay the Dept. of Justice nearly $3 million to settle a federal racial-discrimination housing lawsuit, the largest award ever for a case of its kind." So why, asks California's
Tenants Together,
has the NBA said nothing about Sterling's less than sterling behavior?
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posted by ocherdraco
on Nov 27, 2009 -
27 comments
