A 'whoops' or not. Internet surfing and the badly placed advertising.

 Firstly, I ask you..... What do you see in the web snippet below???

OK.... This is what I see: 

WEB: www.sinfulandwicked.co.uk MOB: 07426 490 214 TWITTER: @sinfulandwicked

TRANS-DENYING FEMINISTS (AKA “TERFS”) – TRANSPHOBIC OR JUST PLAIN WRONG?

"I had generally avoided the “debate” over trans rights and transphobia, which is characterised by plenty of heat and little light, until I debated against Julie Bindel last year on pornography at the University of Essex. There had been calls to cancel the debate, based on Bindel’s alleged transphobia (despite the debate having nothing to do with the issue), and we were inevitably met by a shouty little group of students accusing Bindel of being a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist)."

Trans-Denying Feminists (aka "TERFs") - Transphobic or Just Plain Wrong? - Sex & Censorship





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A Field Guide to Procrastinators

This comic from twenty Pixels came out a couple of weeks ago, but I'm just now getting around to sharing it with you. But that's nothing compared to how long it took 20px to actually get around to drawing it! 

Which kind of procrastinator are you? And don't try to tell us you never put off 'til tomorrow what you should do today. I am at least half of these types

SOURCE

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Uganda: ‘Toxic laws’ cause surge in homophobic hate crimes

“Repression in Uganda is increasingly state sanctioned through the use of blatantly discriminatory legislation that erodes rights guaranteed in the country’s Constitution."

Uganda: 'Toxic laws' cause surge in homophobic hate crimes

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From India and Turkey to Oxford, we live in a perpetual state of war against women

On some days I don’t need to read the news. I know it already. It is basically a list of the women and girls who are the latest to be abused and killed. If it is nearer to us – a teenager murdered and dismembered – we are saddened, while consuming every detail. The dead girl’s face will watch us for a while. And just when it feels too much, her face will soon be replaced by another.

We fixate on individual loss as we feel our way for clues that might help us escape our already dark imaginings. And in the night we wonder where our children are, and who they are with, and what they are doing; we walk ourselves through scenarios in which somehow these awful things would not happen to our children. Or to us. Or to anyone we know. This is the collective secret of motherhood. Let it be someone else’s.

Now, though, we are at one of the recurring stages in the news cycle where, unless we switch off altogether, some things become impossible to ignore – although of course they have been ignored deliberately for a long time. The abuse of young girls? Now it is Oxford – nice Oxford, where in fact a quarter of children live below the poverty line. As with Rotherham and Rochdale, the stories of ongoing abuse and rape finally emerge. If this is all about Pakistani grooming gangs, indeed let’s investigate it fully. But such gangs can operate only in an environment in which the adults who come into contact with these girls do not appear to value them or see them as children. Even when they are turning up with their crotches soaked in blood they are seen to have consented to relationships with much older men, or memorably described as “unrapeable”. Consent only exists for the right class of women.

The right class of women are certainly not to be found in Yarl’s Wood, where asylum seekers are detained. As with the child-abuse stories, all those who work with refugees have been talking about the sexual harassment and self-harming that has been going on there for a long time. This is not a sudden revelation, but now the evidence is there: Serco, the private company running the centre, may have to answer some serious questions. The abuse is systemic.

After years of silence, Turkey’s women are going into battle against oppression  ~ Elif Shafak

In Turkey, women have been out on the streets because of a rising tide of sexual and domestic violence. Since Özgecan Aslan, a 20-year-old student, was murdered after an attempted rape and her burned body found by a riverbed, women have been vocal about the rolling back of their rights by the AK party, with many of its supporters saying that the murdered woman was to blame for seeking “sexual freedom”.

In India, politicians want to ban India’s Daughter, Leslee Udwin’s important documentary about the gang rape of Jyoti Singh. In this film, one sees the attitudes of the rapists and the defence lawyers. It is hard to say which are the most disgusting. Over and over, they state that basically she deserved it for being out with her boyfriend, and that if she had not fought back she might still be alive.

The response of the Indian political class at the time of the attack was appalling, many talking about “adventurous spirit” leading to inevitable rape. Singh was flown out for medical treatment in Singapore, so horrific were her internal injuries, and when she died there her body was brought back not to her village, but cremated at night to avoid more protests. Television at the time – I was there – was suddenly full of middle-class women from Delhi also saying they did not feel safe.

So sexual autonomy and freedom from violence remain an impossibility for most of the world’s women.

In this country, we move from one abuse story to another, not wanting to make the necessary connections. Rape is now recognised as a war crime. What isn’t recognised is that we live in a perpetual state of war. Here comes the obligatory qualifier: terrible things happen to men and boys too. Not all men and boys are terrible, but we operate in a system in which half of us live in fear. According to our level of privilege, we can mute that fear or we can insulate ourselves by focussing on ever-smaller issues. Thus we have feminism as a series of lifestyle choices: can I be a feminist and wear frills/join Isis/not like the new Madonna album?

Sure, that’s easier than trying to dismantle a system that operates very well for some, the world over. When David Cameron says he is going to do something about child abuse, one wonders how he will admit its scale, or admit that the lives of working-class girls are not important to him and, even if they were, that this is beyond the scope of his rudderless government. The make-believe election we are having will always be more of a priority for those who run things.

The war against women is waged routinely and globally. Equality of the most basic kind cannot exist when a woman’s life and her words are always worth less than a man’s. But in the darkness of the night, what haunts us are not broken systems but the faces of the broken girls. So, so many. All the time.

ORIGINAL SOURCE: GUARDIAN: Suzanne Moore


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Turkey’s first women’s daily aims to make women’s voices heard

Turkey’s first ever women’s daily newspaper continues to be published in the southern province of Mersin, where 20-year-old university student Özgecan Aslan was brutally murdered last month.

“Mersin Kadın Gazetesi,” (Mersin Women’s Daily) which only employees women staff, has been appearing for five years and aims to end violence against women and amplify their voices.

It recently published a special edition for March 8 International Women’s Day, printed on a purple background, using photographs of the killed Aslan and many other women who shared the same fate on its front page. Some 5,000 copies were printed and distributed free of charge.

Zeliha Akkuş, the daily’s grant holder and a retired teacher, said they do not cover topics that other newspapers use to catch women’s interest.

“We do not cover topics such as cellulitis, hair care, or how to chat up man. Rather, we cover violence against women and women’s rights stories,” said Akkuş.

She added that the daily’s op-eds are generally written by housewives writing about their daily life experiences.

“In their pieces, women write about their experiences as if they are chatting with their neighbors,” said Akkuş, adding that they often get positive reactions from men as well.

She also explained the meaning of the daily’s logo and the message it gives to readers.

“In the logo, we have a high-heeled shoe and a butterfly. The shoe means that we, women, are coming with our footsteps. The butterfly symbolizes a call that even though the life of women is short, they should participate in solidarity acts and events,” said Akkuş.

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‘Fifty Shades Explored’ – A Qualitative Study of How Female Readers of Sexually Explicit Material View ‘Dominant/Submissive’ Sex and Relationships

This study aimed to investigate how female readers of sexually explicit material view ‘dominant/submissive’ sex and relationships. This was achieved through a qualitative design, utilising open-ended questionnaires and grounded theory analysis. 

The results indicate several areas whereby exposure to Fifty Shades of Grey and its associated ‘phenomenon’ was perceived to have influenced attitudes on a personal and wider level- namely through a process of increasing knowledge, awareness, openness and acceptance accompanied by reducing stigma and, in some cases, influencing behaviour. These findings can be utilised to orientate further exploratory investigation of the influence of erotic literature on women’s attitudes.


ANDREW ROSS









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Most Americans think torture can be justified, but hardly anyone thinks "rectal feeding" is acceptable

This week saw the release of a long-awaited U.S. Senate report detailing the post-9/11 CIA detention and interrogation program with a focus on the agency's the use of torture. According to the report, interrogation procedures used on some detainees that were much harsher and less effective than previously acknowledged. Critics, including former CIA interrogators and Bush administration officials, have called the report politically motivated and inaccurate.

When Americans are asked about suspected terrorists “who may know details about future attacks against the U.S.”, only 24% are prepared to say the use of torture is “never” justified. Nearly as many, 20%, say the use of torture is “always” justified, while the remainder say it’s either “sometimes” (28%) or only “rarely” (18%) justified – a total of 66% who are unwilling to rule out torture completely. There has been little change in views from April, before the release of the report, when 22% said torture was never justified.

Ask people specifically about interrogation tactics detailed in the report, and a more complicated picture emerges. In fact only one tactic – depriving a detainee of sleep – is deemed acceptable by the majority of the public. More people reject than accept seven of the eight other tactics, including waterboarding, which is seen as unacceptable by 45-35%.

By far the least popular tactic was feeding a detainee by pumping a food into his anus, a practice the report calls “rectal feeding”, which three-quarters of Americans say is unacceptable.

Like so many other issues, views about torture are highly polarised politically. 38% of Democrats say torture is never justified, compared to just 11% of Republicans. Republicans are also more open to all of the specified tactics than their Democratic counterparts. In fact, while Democrats tend to say all of the nine tactics are unacceptable, Republicans tend to say all of them are acceptable with one exception – people of all political persuasions reject the use of rectal feeding.

 

People are divided along these same political lines on several other aspects of the debate over the torture, some addressed by the report. 54% Democrats believe the information gained through torture is unreliable; 56% of Republicans think it’s reliable. 58% of Democrats think it is possible to fight terrorism without using torture, while 46% of Republicans think it’s impossible.

PA image

This article has been edited for clarity.

SOURCE: https://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/12/14/americans-find-some-tortures-more-acceptable-other/

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