As the body of the raped and murdered Delhi woman was cremated, normal life continued.

In Kolkata, one of India’s four biggest cities, police said a man reported that his mother had been gang-raped and killed by a group of six men in a small town near the city on Saturday.

She was killed on her way home with her husband, a senior official said, and the attackers had thrown acid at the husband, raped and killed her, and dumped her body in a roadside pond. [Read more…]

Good move.

A member of the hacking group Anonymous broke into the website of Britain’s biggest abortion provider because he “disagreed” with the decisions of two women he knew over their pregnancy terminations, a court heard.

Quite right. Some guy “disagrees” with the decisions that two women made about their pregnancies, so he goes to work to mess up thousands of lives. Because it’s all about him, and his opinions are reason enough to cause harm to thousands of people.

Fortunately he ended up deciding not to publish the details he found by hacking, but not until after he had stolen them.

We’re seeing a lot of this kind of thing. Dude X decides he has a principled hatred of woman Y so by golly he is going to do her harm because he is right and she is wrong. Being right is a license to harm people, according to this way of thinking.

I dissent.

Meanwhile, that “Dear Hacker Community – We Need To Talk” article that I saw yesterday and meant to read and maybe comment on – that article disappeared on account of how Asher Wolf’s site got hacked. Guess what she and the hacker community needed to talk about.

I know a lot the community doesn’t want to talk about this stuff. I know I didn’t personally try to build a bridge between wannabe-crypto-users and hackers so I could deal with shitful sexism, misogyny and down-right crappy behavior.

I know most people would rather just delete a sexist webpage or image, apologize for the offensive comment, or shitty behavior and move on. Again.

But things aren’t changing for the better. And pasting anti-harassment rules on conference wikis doesn’t seem to be making a dent in obviously unacceptable behavior of some arseholes.

Yes, of course, there are arseholes in all communities. But some communities make sexists, misogynists, harassers and general arseholes truly unwelcome.

Unfortunately, the hacker community seems to flounder at making progress in the area of human relations.

Oh how familiar that sounds. The article is back, on a mirror site. Read it.

Christina Hoff Sommers is appalled at the way people are trying to make boys be more like girls and girls be more like boys.

Say what?

The Reklamombudsmannen (RO) has reprimanded Top-Toy, a licensee of Toys”R”Us and one of the largest toy companies in Northern Europe, for its “outdated” advertisements and has pressured it to mend its “narrow-minded” ways. After receiving “training and guidance” from RO equity experts, Top-Toy introduced gender neutrality in its 2012 Christmas catalogue. [Read more…]

I missed the part where Charlotte Allen replied to her critics. It’s a treat.

It’s no small thing, of course, to stop a gunman, whatever his size, but there might have been more of a chance with a few men on hand. I asserted that the “feminized setting” that prevails at elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel creates a culture of “helpless passivity” that puts women and small children at risk when a psychopath like Lanza decides to blow out the doors.

And an admiring audience failed to materialize, so she is explaining it all again. [Read more…]

Laura Bates of Everyday Sexism gives us some more everyday sexism.

Meanwhile, this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival made headlines for featuring a high number of jokes about rape and domestic violence. Such “jokes” are also endemic online.“We must wake up to the way that social media enables and magnifies abuse and harassment of women,” Ms Dustin says. The popular social news website Reddit has entire categories dedicated to “raping women”, “hot rape stories”, and “choke a bitch”. And an article on the student website UniLad in January said: “Eighty-five per cent of rape cases go unreported. That seems to be fairly good odds.”

Yes but those are just tropes and tropes don’t matter and besides “tropes” is a big stuck-up fancy intellectual showoffy conceited arrogant word that only a bitch would use because bitches are so arrogant and bitchy, plus they all stole it from Anita Sarkeesian because nobody ever used it before she did. [Read more…]