Daily excerpts of new fashion, culture, lifestyle, activism and women's news posts 2007-2019.
India: How #MeToo Is Battling Gender-based Violence
The #MeToo campaign has provided a gateway for Indian women to vocalise the “enough is enough” message and seek justice. Some have referred to it as revolutionary. Sadly, the reality is that the majority of women who have encountered harassment will not – or cannot – come forward and voice their stories of victimisation.
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Girls' Underage Marriages Decline By More Than A Third In A Decade, With India Center Stage
UNICEF announced in a new report that the number of underage girls married each year is now estimated at 12 million. Even though the number remains too high, the total a decade ago was a depressing and embarrassing 37 million girls.
“Each and every child marriage prevented gives another girl the chance to fulfill her potential,” Anju Malhotra, UNICEF’s Principal Gender Advisor, says in a press release. “But given the world has pledged to end child marriage by 2030, we’re going to have to collectively redouble efforts to prevent millions of girls from having their childhoods stolen through this devastating practice.”
The data is widespread with major drops of more than a third in India and Ethiopia. The New York Times reports that in Bihar, a poor, agrarian state in northern India, a 2005 survey reported that 60 percent of surveyed women reported being underage when married. A decade later, 42.5 percent report being married under age 18.
In India, the highly-anticipated release of the movie 'Padmavati' has been delayed after a politician from India's governing party has offered a bounty of $1.5 million for the heads of Deepika Padukone, Bollywood's highest-earning actress, who plays the 14th century Hindu queen -- and also the movie's director Sanjay Leela Bhansali.
Padmavati is a fictional queen in the epic poem 'Padmavat' by 16th-century poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi. The poem was written more than 200 years after the actual invasion and was absolutely impacted by folklore.
The poem elevated the virtue of Padmavati, who committed sati, in which a widow immolates herself on her husband's funeral pyre in order to protect her honor. Initially sati was practiced after Hindu men were defeated in battle and to avoid being taken by Muslim men. Like so many customs, the act of sati -- or committing suicide by fire with the death of the husband -- came to be seen as an act of devotion. The custom was outlawed by India's British rulers in 1829 following demands by Indian reformers.
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has courted Hindu nationalists as part of his political base -- as has Donald Trump. In the US presidential election, Hindu nationalists were burning images of Hillary Clinton in the streets.
'Gaysi': Sakshi Juneja's Queer Blog Thrives In India's Illegal Queer Scene
Posting Testino's 'Role Play' for Vogue India, AOC discovered 'Inside Gaysi: the blog transforming India's queer scene', appearing Monday in The Guardian'. Charukesi Ramadurai shares writes that the zine's content includes pieces of fiction, photo-essays, personal narratives, illustrations and how-to guides on the theme of sexual desire, from A Quick Guide to Scissoring to evocative verse on Love in the Age of Surveillance.
India's Bihar Province Women Launch Assault On Alcohol With Dramatic Wins For Families
Bihar is a state in East India, bordering Nepal. It is divided by the River Ganges, which floods its fertile plains. Important Buddhist pilgrimage sites include the Bodhi Tree in Bodhgaya's Mahabodhi Temple, under which the Buddha allegedly meditated. In the state capital Patna, Mahavir Mandir temple is revered by Hindus, while Sikhs worship at the domed, riverside Gurdwara of Takht Sri Harmandir Sahib Ji.
It's easy to conjure up images of women taking their drunk-husband lives into their own hands in the image of Carry Nation, the temperance advocate who attacked saloons in America, hatchet in hand.
But the reality of everyday life in Bihar state province is that the majority of per capita income of $600 a year is routinely spent on alcohol, rather than to advance impoverished families.
A wealthy Indian businessman had intended to celebrate his daughter's wedding with an extravagant party for which he had saved for years. But then a better idea came to fruition.
Instead of paying for the marriage ceremony, Ajay Munot, a cloth and wheat trader based in the Aurangabad district of eastern India, spent the Rs 7 million to 8 million he had saved for the wedding on building homes for the poor, the Free Press Journal reports.
Munot's wedding savings, worth around £93,000, were spent on constructing 90 houses on two acres of land. Each home was 240 square feet, had two windows and doors and had access to filtered drinking water. To insure success, the businessman carefully selected the residents of the new homes under three conditions: they needed to be poor, living in a slum and not suffering from an addiction.
The bride and groom are deeply honored by this long-lasting gift in their honor. via Elle UK
I know from my own experiences on Twitter that when you so much as mention women’s rights and empowerment, hordes of strangers come out of the woodwork to invalidate you with slews of irrelevant questions built upon such false notions: If you’re so feminist, why are you wearing lipstick? If you’re so feminist, why do you wax your legs? If you’re so feminist, why do you like pink? Why do you like men? Why do you wear heels? Why do you watch rom-coms? Why do you bake? Why do you give blowjobs? Why do you read Vogue?
And, unlike Parineeti Chopra, I don’t even have 6 and a half million followers.
They’re all asking: If you’re so feminist, how come you’re doing all that girly shit, bro?
If you’re so feminist, how come you’re not matching my expectations of what feminism looks like?
It's easy to focus on the challenges ahead for Indian women. It was one of those stories that was destined for this blog post tonight. It gives me great please to share such an empowering woman and new movie playing in the US, because that bad news will keep for another day. ~ Anne
Meryl Streep Joined By Sean Penn In Promoting 'India's Daughter for 2016 Best Documentary Oscar
Director Leslee Udwin's film 'India's Daughter' has opened in general release here in America. Although the film about gang rape in India continues to be banned in India, Meryl Streep is aggressively promoting it for a best documentary Oscar in 2016. "When I first saw (the film) I couldn't speak afterwards," the actor said recently in New York.
Streep was joined by Freida Pinto, in promoting 'India's Daughter' at the Tribeca Film Festival in March, and the activist actor has attracted a long and growing list of suporters of the film.
On Tuesday in Los Angeles at the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills, Sean Penn joined Streep in promoting 'India's Daughter'.
Comparing Udwin’s film about the gang rape of 23-year-old Jyoti Singh and the Indian and global protests that followed to an MRI, Penn added: “It made me ponder manhood. It reminded me of a trip I took with my children many years ago to Tanzania. I remember saying to our guide how extraordinary it was to see a culture last the way it had been for a thousand years. And the guide said to me: ‘Don’t wish the static upon anyone. It will kill them.’”
It was our intention to bring AOC readers the full length documentary ‘India’s Daughter’, previously banned in India and YouTube into India. Yesterday, April 16, India’s Supreme Court refused to lift the ban in India, with the next court date on May 27.
Installing the BBC full video last night, I see that the documentary is now frozen on the BBC Storyville website. This critically important loss of global free speech rights and artistic freedom is nothing less than astonishing, as this acclaimed documentary is now totally caught up in India’s court system, even though it is owned by the BBC/Storyville.
Further research not reported in the Times of India recap of yesterday’s court appearances explains what happened. One of the defense attorneys (who has his own problems if you read further) alleges that the film is ‘outcome of fraud and conspiracy’ hatched by documentary maker Leslee Udwin, BBC and a private news channel with advocate VK Anand.
Excellent analysis on the topic of violence against women from Anne’s friend Soraya Chemaly:
Change Culture, Not Cabs: Woman-Only Taxis and Commodifying Female Fear Huff Po
SheTaxis (known as SheRides in New York City) is a newly-launched app that will help women-only passengers find women-only taxi drivers. If you are a woman, the creators argue, it makes sense to use this car service, because taking taxis and Ubers driven by men can be dangerous. There is a whole lot of money to be made helping women adapt to this problem.
This approach to “keeping women safe” is based on the sex segregation model of harassment and stranger rape avoidance at the heart of women-only subway cars in Japan and women-only train compartments in India. It’s the car version of a million “don’t get raped” products, the latest of which is drug-sensing nail polish that women can paint onto their fingertips and dip into drinks. Most solutions advocating segregation or self-defense are variations of “shrink it and pink it” consumer product and public space design. Even Women.Com, a new social network designed as a (safe) space for women only, takes this approach — that women have to take themselves out of spaces shared by men or risk the consequences.
‘Ladies Special’ Trains Roll Indian Women Into the 21st Century AOC Archives Anne’s Blog
Evangelical megachurch begins closing branches after pastor calls women ‘penis homes’ Salon
The Washington-based evangelical megachurch Mars Hill has begun closing branches across the Northwest. Church officials are blaming current financial difficulties on “negative media attention” over founder Mark Driscoll’s “well-documented homophobic and sexist remarks”.
The New York Times recently accused Driscoll of inappropriately using church funds and consolidating power so tightly that it is almost impossible to challenge or question him.
For some time the tide has been turning against Driscoll, who has made a spectacle of himself over the years with his anti-LGBT, anti-woman remarks, many of which he has espoused as key elements of his theology. Preaching theological “complementarianism,” in which women are considered men’s followers and subordinates, Driscoll has expressed a belief that women should always be submissive. According to one report, the pastor once instructed a female congregant to get on her knees and apologize to her husband for failing to bend to his will, then give him a blow job.
In Conversation: Antonin Scalia New York Magazine
In his new indepth interview with Jennifer Senior, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia explains his fundamental views about the role of the Supreme Court in interpreting the US Constitution. Speaking generally about the Supreme Court, Scalia explains:
What I do wish is that we were in agreement on the basic question of what we think we’re doing when we interpret the Constitution. I mean, that’s sort of rudimentary. It’s sort of an embarrassment, really, that we’re not. But some people think our job is to keep it up to date, give new meaning to whatever phrases it has. And others think it’s to give it the meaning the people ratified when they adopted it. Those are quite different views.
Within this frame of reference, a punishment of flogging is “immensely stupid, but it is not unconstitutional” says Justice Scalia. While agreeing that the Fourteenth Amendment covers discrimination against women, the Justics says with ambiguity “If there’s a reasonable basis for not letting women do something — like going into combat or whatnot … “
Read on for Justice Scalia’s views on a wide range of cultural topics.
12 Things No One Told Me About Sex After Rape Thought Catalog
‘The Places We Live’: Four Monumental Slums Typify ‘Home’ for More Than One Billion People
In 2008, for the first time in human history, more people lived in cities than in rural areas. One-third of these urban dwellers—more than one billion people—resided in slums. That number is expected to rise substantially: the United Nations forecasts that the number of slum dwellers will double to two billion people within the next 25 years. Poverty is urbanizing at breakneck speed, and there are few overarching plans to address how cities can accommodate this rapid influx of humans.
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