Laura Bates gave these remarks in the UK Houses of Parliament on Wednesday as part of a gathering of speakers hosted by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.

There are two major barriers to women’s full participation in the democratic process in the UK at the moment—the first relates to their taking part in the vital and shaping process of grassroots activism, and the second to their participation in more traditional political careers.

The process of democracy in the UK is shaped by exciting and vibrant activism, across a whole range of issues, from climate change to women’s equality. Increasingly, in the digital age, this activism is both organized and carried out using online resources such as social media. The Internet is a vital tool in raising the voices of those who have frequently previously been silenced, and allowing marginalized and disadvantaged groups a platform to campaign for their rights. But the experience of participating in an online campaign or in online activism is manifestly different for men than it is for women.

Simply by participating in online spaces, women are faced with a barrage of content that can make it a hostile and dangerous environment for them.

Rape jokes, domestic violence memes and entire forums dedicated to violent misogyny exist close to the surface …



… with images like these cropping up on popular social networking sites.

But more specifically, women who dare to use their voices to discuss politics or take part in democratic processes online tend to face a barrage of online abuse. I have experienced this myself almost constantly since starting the Everyday Sexism Project two years ago. It ranges from online harassment and sexist responses to political debate which utterly ignore the content of said debate in favor of outright misogyny …






http://www.womenundersiegeproject.org/blog/entry/how-misogyny-is-preventing-women-from-fully-participating-in-the-democratic

SWEEPING
Feminist: Hold broom firmly, make long strokes on floor until all dirt has been gathered into a small pile.
Not feminist: Hold broom firmly, make long strokes on floor until all dirt has been gathered into a small pile. Tell the broom that its body is shameful and whorish.

LAUNDRY
Feminist: Sort clothing into lights, darks, and colors. Wash whites on hot, and colors and darks on cold. Dry according to instructions.
Not feminist: Sort clothing into lights, darks, and colors. Wash whites on hot, and colors and darks on cold. Dry according to instructions. Tell your daughter that if she doesn't stay skinny then no man will ever love her.

DUSTING
Feminist: Spray a dusting solution over the dusty surface you wish to clean. Using a soft cloth made of natural fiber, wipe in small circles until you've covered the entire surface.
Not feminist: Spray a dusting solution over the dusty surface you wish to clean. Await a man's further instructions. Any man.

WASHING DISHES
Feminist: Fill sink up with warm water and dish soap. Scrub dishes. Rinse. Dry.
Not feminist: Fill sink up with warm water and dish soap. Scrub dishes. Rinse. Dry. Make a call to your congressman opposing the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

feminism
Copy of pm mail to to seaybeyond, gromycuss, sheldon cooper, redqueen, ismnotwasm, screeming meemie, baines bane and other harpies if I left any out.
All you man hating girls really crack me up..the only defense you have is ganging up and bullying and banning anyone who disagrees with you in your little world..Your silly and assinine arguments would not last otherwise in a real debate. And yes that proves you are WEAK and full of shit if you have to ban any dissent.
Bunch of fuckin losers..that is all you are..grumpy, frumpy and I bet less than attractive fat harpies..80-100k post on a forum..Seabeyond.. 85,000 post in one year? Are you mental? On disability? WTF is that? Life on the internet is all you have. Get a life srs. Big cheeses in your own mind on a stupid board with 20 other loser women blaming men for all your ills.

Yes I have an awesome wife..she is out making things happen..yes she has encountered sexism in her business..You know what she does? She tells them to fuck off and moves on and goes somewhere else and buys from someone who appreciates her business. Does not complain about it on the internet or cry “I am a victim woe me” My wife is a the real deal leading by action not words.
I have many women in my business world I deal with every day..they would laugh at all of you man hating losers.
Let’s see you post this letter in it’s entirely without changes... Come at me if you have the balls or is that ovaries?

I know I will be banned..don’t care..gotta get back to work anyway.. though it would be fun to debate you w/o fear of being banned for my comments but that would never happen..you could not handle the truth

Yes, not only does Oregon boast a relatively inexpensive housing market, scenic, bridge-laden landscapes and resident badass Carrie Brownstein, it's also home to a plethora of world-renowned craft breweries. On top of it all, Hood River’s employee-owned Full Sail Brewing has recently elevated my Pacific-Northwest crush to a new level by publicly combining my two all-time favorite things ever: feminism and beer. Oh, Oregon! If you weren’t so dang rainy all the time, I swear I’d gay marry you.

Because they’re super awesome (did I mention they’re 100% worker-owned?), Full Sail has instituted a "Brewer’s Share" program: each staff member gets to brew and keg an experimental beer that they design and name themselves, even if they’re not a part of the regular brewing team. They also get to dedicate all the proceeds from their special limited edition to a charity of their choosing. This time around, Full Sail’s Marketing Coordinator Stephanie Duffy whipped up a Cascadian Dark Ale brewed with ample rich malts and aggressive hops and clocking in at 7.5% ABV and 82 IBUS (a measure of bitterness). With those flavor profiles, Duffy’s Counterpunch, as she’s calling it, is clearly made to give the average light lager or fruity Hefeweizen a kick in the pants.



STEPHANIE DUFFY (VIA FULLSAILBREWING.COM)
"My beer defies the traditional expectations of a 'girl's beer.' Like many women, I love my beer and I appreciate a broad cross-section of craft brews," reports Duffy on a Full Sail press release. "Even though the beer industry is still very male-dominated (like so many other industries) I thought it was especially appropriate to brew a bold, strong beer in honor of all the bold, strong women who shirk stereotypes and avoid being pigeonholed. We’re in no need of pandering!"

Duffy considers her bold brew her feminist argument in liquid form. To seal the deal, she named my beloved radical rag Bitch Magazine as her charity recipient. Drinking delicious beer while also benefiting feminist media criticism? I think I’m in love.

In a press conference with Gloria Allred (who is representing the seven women), former student Kylie Angell tearfully recounted her experience with campus security and the university's Community Standards department after she was raped by a classmate in a UConn dorm. It's heartbreaking:

I was notified on the same day as the [Community Standards] hearing that [my rapist] was to be expelled and he was not to be allowed to come back on campus again. Though I was emotionally and mentally exhausted, I felt that this was a victory and that I could finally go back to my life as a student. Then, two weeks later, I was eating in the dining hall, when the perpetrator sat down next to me and threateningly grazed my elbow in an act of obvious defiance. I was then met by heckling by his friend, who shouted at me that the perpetrator was back.

Unaware of what was going on and feeling that I was in a nightmare, I fled the scene to the UConn police. The officer told me, "Women need to stop spreading their legs like peanut butter or rape is going to keep happening 'til the cows come home." Shocked, I left, feeling confused, violated, traumatized and vulnerable. [Breaks down sobbing] I then learned that the perpetrator had filed an appeal, but I had not been informed that it had been filed... The only explanation that I was given was that the Vice President of Student Affairs felt that expulsion for having raped me was too severe.

Angell went on to describe how her PTSD and anxiety caused her to feel unsafe in her own apartment, to miss days of classes, and to suffer academically. She also stated that after she tried to speak out she was threatened by the administration, who told her she could lose her campus job for being vocal about her attack. She told the Huffington Post that she later learned that her attacker went on to rape another woman a year later.

http://jezebel.com/7-women-file-complaint-against-uconn-for-failing-to-res-1450247823

They’ve targeted Blacks, Latinos and college students. Now Texas has come up with a Voter ID law that will disproportionately affect women – the constituency they most fear will support Wendy Davis.


Women are Wendy Davis’ natural base. Her eleven-hour filibuster of an abortion bill that closed family planning clinics in Texas is the reason she has the name recognition and the political capital to make a run for governor. Anti-choice groups who have never before had to spend money opposing a pro-choice candidate are scrambling to form political action groups to run ads against her. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, the man who is most likely to be her opponent, has been touting himself as the real pro-woman candidate for his success at collecting back child support from deadbeat dads. Now, Republicans have found what they hope will be a more reliable plan than trying to persuade women that Republicans have their best interest at heart:

Don’t let women vote.

Think Progress reports that as of November 5, Texans must show a photo ID with their up-to-date legal name. It sounds like such a small thing, but according to the Brennan Center for Justice, only 66% of voting age women have ready access to a photo document that will attest to proof of citizenship. This is largely because young women have not updated their documents with their married names, a circumstance that doesn’t affect male voters in any significant way. Suddenly 34% of women voters are scrambling for an acceptable ID, while 99% of men are home free.

"Is this why you came here all the way from Australia? To kill babies?”

I didn't set out to become a clinic escort. Sure, I'd seen footage of angry anti-abortion protesters harassing women and threatening doctors, but thought that only happened in such places as Kansas and Mississippi, not here in New York City.

When a local feminist group told me that escorts - volunteers who “escort” patients from the street and into the clinic - were desperately needed at a women's health centre in a low-income area of Queens, I was motivated as much by curiosity as my passion for reproductive rights.


It was 7am and I couldn't believe people would get up so early on a Saturday to stand outside a medical clinic and yell at patients going in. But they do. And anti-abortion protesters fervently believe they are doing the “Lord's work”.

They are also adamant that everyone working for the clinic, escorts included, has “blood on their hands”.

The “antis”, as we call them, spread out across the street in a 200-metre radius from the clinic. They brandish the familiar images of allegedly aborted foetuses. Some of them follow patients to the front door, crying out things such as “Please don't kill your baby!” and “You will regret this for the rest of your life”, and even “Don't kill me mommy!” in falsetto.

“Your culture,” he spat, “has invaded my culture for the last 800 years!” I must admit, I was a little confused by this. I might be British by birth but it certainly wasn’t my choice and my ancestors are traditionally those who have been raped and pillaged by imperialists so I couldn’t get my head around what he meant. “You’re a British imperialist!” He said this a few times but it didn’t make a difference in my comprehension. Here was this white man with an Australian accent and hefty mousey dreadlocks accusing me of racially controlling him and I wasn’t happy. This is where I got a bit sweary. I asked him what he meant by that as I made a point of looking at my skin and he replied “well, your accent is really English.” This person clearly hasn’t spent any time in this country or spoken to any people of colour living in Western societies otherwise he’d know that accents have very fucking little to do with a person’s roots. That and he’s a big fat racist. We called him that and we called him a rape apologist. A couple of his supporters really didn’t like that. One man, with his fuzzy mullet and flat cap brought his camcorder right into my face, his lips shaking, trying to intimidate me into silence. ANY anarchist worth their fucking politics knows you do not film comrades so with this in mind, we assumed he was a copper and called it as such. He didn’t like that. Dread man called us ‘hysterical’ and we all whooped. There were calls for making the most of it with a game of manarchist bingo as things went from ridiculous to brain numbingly tedious. He randomly accused two of our group of killing 11 people in Northern Ireland, accusing one of them of being Northern Irish.

The crowd around us got bigger, comrades very much on our side and the others, men who seemed utterly heartbroken (pissed off) that we were chanting “kill all men”. One well-meaning chap explained how his mum was a feminist and how he had support for women but he felt alienated by phrases such as the one we were using. Assuming he was an anarchist, I asked him if he’d ever said ‘ACAB’ or ‘eat the rich’ and then whether he said these in the absolute belief that there wasn’t a single good cop in the world or that he might actually munch on the upper classes because if he was saying it, then he obviously he meant it. There was a slight pause before he understood what I was saying but he persisted in advising that we were pushing the average man away.

Here’s the thing: we don’t give a shit about the average man. We’re not teachers, we’re not leaders, we’re not going to break it down for you in a language you understand. We are expressing ourselves, nothing more, nothing less. We say these extreme things because, powerless as we are, sometimes it is the only thing in our arsenal. Words are powerful, yes, and for those fleeting few seconds, we are in control and you can’t hurt us.

As the crowd dissipated we made our way to the foyer for the AnarchaFem conference but on the way in, we were confronted by fuzzy mullet man. His face started twitching again, he must have really been resisting the impulse to physically attack me, his whole demeanour was triggering of the men who have attacked me in the past. I felt eerily calm, pushing his finger down when he pointed it in my face and moving into his space to see how he liked it. “Do you believe in free speech?” He repeated this over and over. Comrades shouted “rape apologist cop!” at him but this didn’t change his stance. It was only when a male comrade physically put his body between us that this manz sloped off, the bulk of my male friend clearly too much of a challenge.

The government shutdown is frustrating enough for furloughed workers, but for families dependent on federal food assistance, it's infuriating.

Enter the Feminist Hulk.

The Twitter monster is smashing the shutdown's threats to the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Food and Nutrition program, which provides food aid to pregnant women and mothers of young children deemed to be at risk of malnutrition. And she's urging her nearly 74,000 followers to help.

Feminist Hulk is Jessica Lawson, a doctoral student in English literature at the University of Iowa who's also a mother and WIC aid recipient. She first started tweeting against sexism in 2010 – her Twitter profile reads "HULK SAYS F*** PATRIARCHY. HULK SMASH GENDER BINARY."

Since then, she's been called "the biggest superhero" of online feminism. And she's collected a massive social media fan club with tweets about motherhood, patriarchy and kale — which she's using for good during the shutdown, setting up this online resource to help families find baby food and formula.