The thought of pregnant teens getting jacked into carrying pregnancies to term by a shitty lottery draw via the judicial bypass system is so horrifying to me. I’ve heard the “school nurse won’t give my kid an aspirin without my permission, why should they be able to get an abortion” arguments and I’m sorry, the idea of forcing a human to give birth against their will is utterly morally repugnant, whatever their age:
The records I reviewed show that if a judge doesn’t want to grant a petition, she will find a reason to deny it. One 17-year-old in Alabama tried to satisfy the state’s requirement that minors be well informed by asking six people—a woman who’d had an abortion, a family friend, two nurses, and staffers at Planned Parenthood and the local health department—about the procedure. In court, she described the procedure in detail, naming the surgical instruments used. When the judge asked the girl—a straight-A student bound for college on two scholarships—if she felt emotionally ready to have an abortion, she replied, “I am. I’ve been strong-minded about all of this.”
The judge then denied her petition because she hadn’t spoken to the doctor who would perform the procedure. (The girl said the doctor refused to talk to her; clinics often limit contact with minors before their bypass hearing.)
“I’m a mother,” said the judge, who is not named in the court documents. “These people are interested in one thing, it appears to me, and that is getting this young lady’s money…This is a beautiful young girl with a bright future, and she does not need to have a butcher get ahold of her.” A divided appeals court upheld the judge’s denial.
my trick to not looking ignorant is that when I don’t know anything about a particular subject I simply don’t speak out of ignorance
— An Amazon Wishlist (@ShrillCosby) September 17, 2014
When the police are forced to get serious about their reporting numbers, rape stats go up.
McSweeney’s becomes a non-profit publishing house.
It gave me great pleasure to witness Kate Harding supporting affirmative consent AND explaining why Danny didn’t rape Mindy, so:
When you become sexually active, you quickly learn that sex as it’s practiced in the real world nearly always demands small, quick renegotiations as you go along. Sometimes a long-term partner wants to try something new in bed, and sometimes even the old things hurt if you do them at the wrong angle. Sometimes the person on the bottom wants to be on top, or somebody’s arm gets squished, or a head bashes into the headboard. Sometimes, an act that felt great when your partner started it actually makes you feel sore after a couple of minutes, and you need it to stop, even though you enthusiastically consented to the act before and loved what was happening up to that point. Real people having real sex deal with this shit all the time. Practicing affirmative consent means being cognizant of how your partner’s responding to everything that happens, doing everything you can to make sure you’re both happy, and respecting the other person’s boundaries even when they conflict with your immediate desires. In other words, it’s what decent people already do, without being told.
I have become the last person in the world to begin watching American Horror Story (like, I just watched the first three episodes of the first season with my cousins, my husband was like “no i will not follow u there gonna watch the base-ball instead i put up with so much of your nonsense already”) and WELL. Well. that shit is wiiiild.
a longread on orlando OKAY!!!!!
With Orlando, the narrator begins to describe how the passage of time works on the young man (“He saw the beech trees turn golden and the young ferns unfurl; he saw the moon sickle and then circular”), then breaks off: “but probably the reader can imagine the passage which should follow and how every tree and plant in the neighborhood is described first green, then golden; how moons rise and suns set; how spring follows winter and autumn summer,” and so forth. Woolf takes a casual jab at her previous masterworks: the narrator concludes that one might just as easily summarize the passage of time with “the simple statement that ‘time passed’ (here the exact amount could be indicated in brackets) and nothing whatever happened.”
there actually are stupid questions:
The best example might be the woman who, after finding out what Red Umbrella Project does, asked us, “But if your organization is made up of current and former sex workers, how do you keep the current ones from recruiting the former ones?” The member who she asked was floored as he tried to explain that that has never been a problem. How could you explain to someone with that view of sex work that no, our organization is not partially made up of unscrupulous hookers lurking around trying to sucker recovering trafficking victims back into a life of drug-addled degradation? We all tried to explain, taking varying tacks with forced cordiality. We explained that RedUP is made up of sex workers from all walks of life and varying circumstances, that our main goal is to give our members the tools to tell their own stories and advocate for themselves, and would you like to take a look at our literary journal of sex worker memoirs? It was exhausting, but it felt important for us to be there, no matter how much teeth-gritting it took.
