Statement from Caroline Criado Perez on the release of the new £10 note

Caroline Criado-Perez

© Tracy King

Back in 2013, the Bank of England announced that they were removing the only female historical figure from our banknotes and replacing her with Winston Churchill. As then chief cashier Chris Salmon himself noted, “The Bank is uniquely privileged to be able to use its banknotes to promote awareness and understanding of the contribution of key figures from our past to our cultural, artistic and scientific legacy.” What did it say about the Bank’s view of our history then, that all of the people selected for this honour just happened to be white men?

Three months later, via a threatened judicial review, and some mansplaining from then Governor Mervyn King about how the Queen was on the banknotes so this was all a load of nonsense, the Bank finally accepted its duties under the Public Sector Equality Duty, and announced that the next ten pound note would…

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It Stands to Reason

“We live a society that sometimes pays lip service to thinking for yourself but doesn’t particularly encourage it. Instead we live in a culture in which irrational, uncritical conformity of thought is far too common.”  — Sharon Presley

The Blog of David Mark Keirsey

“It is my nature to be what I am.”

No, she didn’t say that, Emma Goldman did, but she could have said the same.

And, she knew much of what Goldman said was good, but not all.  You see, she could learn from Goldman  — and Rand, Milgram, Harman, …. and from Voltairine de Cleyre.

— NO, THAT AIN’T VOLTAIRE.

… she could decide what ideas were good, and bad, from each of those individuals who she read from, for herself. Yes, for …

Only the Self-Educated are Free…

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Freda White

For a short time in the sixties and early seventies I had two great female friends. I was in my twenties, Frances Gordon in her fifties and Freda White in her late seventies. I had recently graduated from Glasgow University and was accumulating educational qualifications; Frances had a degree from the LSE gained in the 1930s and was a linchpin in the political and cultural life of Edinburgh; Freda was among the first graduates from Somerville College, Oxford, an author, journalist, campaigner and lecturer of international renown.

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Why dishing out the stats on risk doesn’t change our perception of terror threats

Ketan Joshi

Immigration leads to terrorism. That’s the load-bearing claim underpinning a recent trend in Australian and American political messaging. It seems like a potent line of argument – terror threats are so visceral, and there’s plenty of purchase to be found for anti-immigration sentiment in Australia.

Some of the potency of this feeling comes from the way we perceive risk. There’s a collection of recognisable factors that will skew our gut reactions away from actual, measurable risk and towards ‘perceived risk’. These psychometric factors are good predictors of how we’ll respond to a threat.

Terror attacks are horrific and effective tools for skewing risk perception. They’re catastrophic, severe, unpredictable, fatal, immediate and random. The most recent example targeted children. In addition to the many lives extinguished by these insane acts of murder, the impacts extend well into the hearts and minds of societies.

A recent episode of the ABC’s Q&A illustrated…

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Who Keeps Women’s Secrets?

Mistaking histories

First Secret Entrusted to Venus, François Jouffroy (1839)

“Do you want to know a secret?”

When I was at school, there were various other pupils who would pose this question in some corner of the playground at break times. Often, the secret turned out to be something I knew already, or something I didn’t find very interesting, but for these children knowledge was power, and the language of secrecy was intended to set up a special bond in which they would impart the secret to an audience which was then supposed to see itself as privileged. Secret codes, secret files, secret societies, conspiracy theories … for both children and adults, the secret still has power.

Questions remain for historians about who knew what, and who told what to whom, surrounding knowledge of the body, particularly the reproductive body, in the ancient Mediterranean. Who knew, or claimed to know, about how…

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The engine of irrationality inside the rationalists

Ketan Joshi

There’s a multi-directional cacophony of gleeful back-patting ringing out across my Twitter feed at the moment. The outpouring of joy stems from an article published in Skeptic Magazine. Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay managed to submit a hoax article to a gender studies journal, and are hailing this as a profound, thermonuclear indictment on the entirety of gender studies, social science and the “academic left”. They wrote that:

“We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal” 

Their article was initially rejected by a journal, “NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies”. But they were referred to a smaller outlet, ‘Cogent Social Sciences’, that offers publication where you ‘pay what you like’ (apparently, they didn’t pay anything).

On the face of…

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Woman in South #Delhi #Raped, Sexually Tortured, & Killed by her Friend

NEWS REPORTS FROM THE 50 MILLION MISSING CAMPAIGN

12 January 2014

2 days ago, the semi-naked body of a woman, with her hands tied, and signs of rape and sexual torture, found in an upscale neighborhood had sent shock waves through the city. The police have now identified and arrested a friend of the woman for her rape and murder.
http://m.ndtv.com/article/india/delhi-woman-raped-tortured-strangled-by-friend-after-fight-say-police-647386?update=1421175000

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65-year-old woman dies after being #gang- #raped in #India

A poor 65 Year old Indian woman, is raped, tortured and dies from blood loss as a result of her wounds from these men, where is the media to cover this?

NEWS REPORTS FROM THE 50 MILLION MISSING CAMPAIGN

19 January 2015, Varanasi, UP

A 65 year old widow who lived alone died due to excessive blood loss, after she was gang raped by four men, who also sexually tortured her by inserting various objects into her private parts.

http://m.timesofindia.com/india/65-year-old-woman-dies-after-being-gang-raped-assaulted-in-UP/articleshow/45942476.cms

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How is Libertarian Feminism Different from Other Feminisms?

How is Libertarian Feminism Different from Other Feminisms?

by Sharon Presley

No system of government can hope long to survive the cynical disregard of both law and principle which government in America regularly exhibits. Under these circumstances, no legal guarantee of rights is worth the paper it is written on, and the women who rely upon such guarantees to protect them against prejudice and discrimination are leaning on a broken reed.

     –Suzanne LaFollette, Concerning Women

Read more here: http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/how-is-libertarian-feminism-different-other-feminisms

 

Freedom Feminism Still Isn’t Either..

Any so-called “freedom feminism” that includes Phyllis Schlafly and the anti-choice wing of the conservative movement is not libertarian, says Sharon Presley.