No respectable reader will trust the gender critiques of a man who is so incensed by company efforts to advance women in tech roles that he sinks hours of his own time into explaining why lady brains cannot execute the technical, high-pressure roles occupied by men at Google. But there is a sizable built-in audience for this kind of lament for the days when men were men and women just didn’t want to do man jobs. That audience is the men’s rights movement.
Thanks in part to the Beyoncé “We should all be feminists” shirts and to feminist Twitter, it’s finally becoming cool (as well as necessary) to identify as a feminist. At least that’s what a new, 2,000-person UM London survey suggests: A full 69 percent of British girls ages 13 to 18 answered “yes” to the question “Would you personally define as a feminist?” compared with just 46 percent of women overall.
Abortion is not controversial on the left. So what does it say that so many lefty men are willing to scrap it in an attempt to pander to some vague fantasy of a vast, disgruntled, anti-choice center? What kind of cringing, bewildered invertebrates roll over and capitulate to the losing side of a debate at a time when they’ve never had more leverage? What contortionist of logic came up with the proposal that alienating 75 percent of one’s constituents, and declaring half to not deserve control over their bodies, can strengthen a party’s numbers? This is not broadening our coalition; it’s flagrantly shrinking it.
Women make up the fastest-growing segment of incarcerated people in the U.S., and about half are in jails, where people are held before their trials, after violating the terms of their parole, or after being sentenced to less than a year in lock-up. Between 1970 and 2014, the country saw a 14-fold increase of the population of women in jails, mostly for low-level drug offenses, loitering, and other crimes associated with broken-windows policing. More than 8 in 10 women in jail have survived sexual violence; nearly as many have experienced domestic abuse. About one-third of women in jail are living with severe mental illnesses, more than twice the rate of men in jail.
Cindy Southworth, the executive vice president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, tells Bustle that there are many factors at play in these high murder rates. “Institutional racism and the over-policing of people of color adds a significant barrier to survivors reaching out for help from the justice system,” she says, “putting women of color at heightened risk of homicide.