The Miniskirt

Since Steubenville, the hacktivist collective has found an ethically dicey new role: seeking justice for rape victims.

This is so. incredible. Makes me want to break out into slow clap.

Know Your IX aims to educate every college student in the U.S. about his or her rights under Title IX by the start of the next academic term.

Help these inspiring ladies get started. Know Your IX!

“The roots of Galpin’s commitment to women’s rights stretch back to her teens. She grew up in Bismarck, N.D., and at 17 apprenticed as a modern dancer in Minneapolis. One night, while she was walking through an empty park downtown, she was raped and stabbed several times by a man who appeared from the shadows.

After the attack, Galpin quit dancing and moved back to North Dakota. With the exception of family members and close friends, she told almost no one that she had been raped until 2009, when she spoke about Mountain2Mountain on “Dateline NBC.”

“For years, I was petrified that I’d be defined as a victim,” she said during a visit to New York last month. “I didn’t realize that victimhood could also be a source of strength.”

voxstudentsforchoice:

Join VOX: Students for Choice at the Memorial Student Center (located on the campus of Marshall University) this Monday from 10AM-5PM.

VOX members will be taking a vow of silence in honor of victims who do not have a voice in our society, or whose voice is blocked out by victim blaming. At…

sorayachemaly:

1. If you use the expression “boys will be boys,” think about why and what it means. Then STOP.
2. Understand and don’t trivialize the effects of stereotypes and media messaging. 
3. Challenge authority, especially authorities that derive power from systems based on complementary roles for men and women. 
4. Don’t sugarcoat sexualized violence, don’t laugh at it, and don’t repeat well-debunked rape mythologies. 
5. Don’t slut-shame girls or stud-bait boys. 
6. If you have kids, boys and girls, make them do domestic work—the exact same kind of domestic work. Sounds silly, right? But, here’s the thing, when children do domestic work they value it, they understand what unpaid labor is, they are better at empathizing and they grow up to be more egalitarian. It’s small but significant.
7. Teach boys to cross-gender empathize. 
8. Speak openly about bodies, consent, rights, and autonomy. 
9. Don’t give your children’s school a pass when they transmit common biased ideas because of “tradition,” or to be “polite.” 
10. Choose your sports carefully. Our national sport, football, glorifies brute force, physical dominance, violence, and literally marginalizes women and LGBTQ people. 

As with rape, many of the items on this list have traditionally been sidelined as “women’s issues.” So, lastly, if you think certain things are “women’s issues,” think again. There are very few things—maybe tampon technology—that are uniquely specific to women. Otherwise, especially when it comes to the Big Issue, there is almost nothing that ISN’T a “women’s issue,” including the economy, war and militarism, state security, global warming, scientific denialism, and abuse of power in every manifestation. These are  “problems we face involving men with unchallenged power.”