More on the campaign against women on the internet: Amanda Hess on Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet.

A woman doesn’t even need to occupy a professional writing perch at a prominent platform to become a target. According to a 2005 report by the Pew Research Center, which has been tracking the online lives of Americans for more than a decade, women and men have been logging on in equal numbers since 2000, but the vilest communications are still disproportionately lobbed at women. [Read more…]

A scalding post by Janet Stemwedel, on the expectation of trust. It’s a ventriloquial sort of post, speaking in the voice of someone else. It’s variations on the theme: “you should trust me.” It’s extremely well done.

Yes, I used the cover of friendship, your loyalty and my apparent track record of not-misbehaving with hundreds of women (including you!), of being a good guy except for one single lapse of judgment (which I swore was not as bad as it sounded, because that woman who you didn’t know was trying to take me down), to ask you privately to convince a couple other people that I was still a good guy. I guess it was awkward when you discovered I’d split up the list of people who needed convincing and asked other people to do this too? [Read more…]

There are people who say that Dallas hospital is getting the law wrong.

The hospital says Texas law prohibits it from following a family directive when a pregnancy is involved, although three experts say the hospital is misreading the law in question.

There’s something very wrong with this country. On the one hand, “stand your ground” laws, so if some guy thinks a kid in a hoodie might be up to no good, he’s allowed to kill him to be on the safe side. On the other hand, technology can re-start a pregnant woman’s heart even after the brain is already stone dead and the fetus’s brain probably is too, but neither can be allowed to die the rest of the way until the woman’s body expels the fetus. No big deal about the kid in the hoodie, but ignore every right the pregnant woman ever had just in case the fetus might survive. [Read more…]

Katha Pollitt has a roundup of the year in feminism. Again, 12 and 13 are among my favorites.

11. After Savita Halappanavar was killed by sepsis in 2012, because her doctors refused to complete her miscarriage while the doomed fetus showed signs of life, Ireland passed a law permitting abortion to save a woman’s life. Well, it’s a start. In other Irish news, the McAleese report linked the government to the infamous church-run Magdalene laundries, where “fallen women” were imprisoned until 1996.

12. Women in Britain discovered their inner rebel. The website and hashtag Everyday Sexism laid bare the daily reality of misogyny for ordinary women. Massive grassroots efforts succeeded in putting Jane Austen on the ten-pound note, despite threats of rape and death against campaign leaders Caroline Criado-Perez and MP Stella Creasy.

13. Last year’s horrible rapes from Delhi to Steubenville sparked an ongoing wave of news coverage and feminist activism. Real change will have to wait till next year, though. This year, Jameis Winston, who evaded rape charges as many athletes do, won the Heisman Trophy.

A prediction: real change will always have to wait till next year.

Darlise Munoz of Dallas was 14 weeks pregnant when she died suddenly of what doctors think was a pulmonary embolism. Her husband found her at home; he performed CPR and called for an ambulance, and she was taken to John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth.

Electric shocks and drugs started her heart again and it continued beating with mechanical support, but her brain waves were completely flat. She had gone without breathing for too long to ever recover.

But when the heartbroken family was ready to say goodbye, hospital officials said they could not legally disconnect Marlise from life support. At the time she collapsed, she was 14 weeks’ pregnant. [Read more…]

Some grey bloke has 17 predictions for 2014.

I especially like 12 and 13.

From last September, a Think Progress piece about a big UN report on the roots of sexual violence.

Among the conclusions…

Unhealthy attitudes about sexuality take root at a young age. More than half of the study’s respondents who admitted they had violated someone’s consent were teenagers when they first raped someone. [Read more…]

There are protests in India over the gang-rape and murder of that teenage girl in Kolkata.

Apparently the authorities are no longer talking about suicide.

She was then set on fire on December 23 and died in a state-run hospital late on New Year’s Eve, police said.

“She gave us a dying declaration in front of the health officials that she was set on fire by two persons close to the accused when she was alone at home on December 23,” local policeman Nimbala Santosh Uttamrao told AFP. [Read more…]