A reader alerted me to a famous Belgian cartoonist’s response to Sophie Peeters’s documentary on street harassment of women.

She translated for me. The title is “More women get verbally harassed on the streets.” The cop is asking the woman, “What did the harasser look like?” She is replying, “Blue eyes, red nose, shabby clothes and not a complete set of teeth.”

Apparently the point is that she’s dressed like a whore and she’s enormous, while the guy she’s reporting to the cop is small and beaten to a pulp.

In other words, bitchez be lyin.

Mick Nugent has the latest post in Amy’s series, and it’s a Mars landing of a post. He gets it. (I know that’s an expression that some people dislike…but it does describe something, as does its obverse.) He gets what it’s like, and how it’s bad and harmful.

We should not tolerate, in any of our online or offline communities, any sexual harassment or abuse or threats of violence against women that we would not tolerate if they were directed against our family or close friends. On the Internet, many women face a pattern of online sexual harassment, including rape threats, in the technology, business, entertainment, atheist, skeptical, pop culture, gaming and many other online communities. [Read more…]

We’re safe on Mars.

We’ve got thumbnails.

That’s a wheel!

Holy shit.

Curiosity has landed safely. It’s sent back pictures. I’m watching a room full of laughing crying hugging partying engineers.

John Protevi on body dimorphism in gymnastics.

…a glaring instance of gender inequality is with the sport that is usually said to get the best TV ratings, women’s gymnastics. The difference is in the disciplines. The men do 6 disciplines: floor, vault, pommel horse, high bar, parallel bars, and rings. The women do floor (but with music, which the men do not have), vault (but with the horse placed horizontal to the runway, whereas it is longways for the men), uneven parallel bars, and balance beam.

The resulting difference in demands produces a striking body dimorphism, with women gymnasts being very small and thin in the upper body compared to the men.

Indeed – also very young; also very small all over as well as in the upper body; also very made-up and with sparkly stuff in their hair. They’re part athlete part dancer part showgirl. It’s seriously weird.

 

And there’s Colombia, where acid attacks on women are the hot new fad.

It’s heartbreaking.

Every glance at a mirror transports Consuelo Cordoba to the moment when her boyfriend doused her with a skin-searing acid that obliterated her face, leaving her with gruesome wounds that will never heal. [Read more…]

On a pleasanter note – the Curiosity Rover is close to Mars and will be landing in about ten hours. This is seriously exciting.

The Nasa robot’s flight trajectory is so good engineers cancelled the latest course correction they had planned.

To be sure of touching down in the right place on the surface, the vehicle must hit a box at the top of the atmosphere that is just 3km by 12km.

“Our inbound trajectory is right down the pipe,” said Arthur Amador, Curiosity’s mission manager.

It’s been on the way for eight months. It’s got the best scientific equipment evarrr to drill into rocks and scoop up samples. It’s got energy to last for 14 years.

JPL Mars program.

There’s a guy in Pakistan who, according to some reports, has been holding drink and dance parties during Ramadan.

So the fuck what, you ask. So he and a woman were forced by police to walk naked to the police station.

Really. There’s this religious holiday, which requires participants to drink nothing (including water) and eat nothing from dawn to dusk. Some guy didn’t participate, therefore the cops humiliated him and some woman on the way to the police station. That’s some totalizing religion! No opting out. Don’t like it? Fine, take your clothes off, you’re busted.

The BBC’s Shahzeb Jillani says incidents of public dishonouring are not uncommon in Pakistan, but this incident is particularly shocking because it was carried out by police and filmed on mobile phones.

Last year, several men were arrested for stripping a middle aged woman naked and parading her round the village as punishment for her son allegedly having an affair with a woman in their family.

Shahnaz Bibi told the BBC at the time that her life had been ruined by the ordeal, and she could never go home.

Relentless everyday hatred and humiliation, casually trashing people’s lives for petty reasons or even to punish someone else. It makes me shiver with disgust.

The theocratic group Sharia4Belgium responded to Sophie Peeters’s documentary about street harassment by remarking that she dresses like a whore.

In Thursday’s video message Sharia4Belgium said of Ms Peeters that “She walks the streets half-naked and dresses like a cheap prostitute. She has painted her face like a clown. She has done all this to attract the attention of men.”

The fundamentalist group believes that Ms Peeters provoked the men in the film.

“Why do you think that women go about scantily-clad and with painted faces? It’s to get reactions from men.”

 

Asks the blogger at Above the Field. He can and he should, he answers himself.

Yesterday I read of a sexual assault in Washington DC that occurred not long ago. A bicyclist cruised up to a woman and stuck his hand up her skirt, violating her very being before riding away laughing. It would be easy to pass this off as an isolated incident of some pervert getting his kicks, except that this particular woman victim (Liz Gorman) wrote a blog about it, and hundreds responded with their own stories of similar experiences and worse. [Read more…]