This Week in Misogyny is Wearing Pants to the Prom

And the hits just keep on rolling, y’all. State legislatures have been busy passing even more anti-abortion bills that are probably unconstitutional, but that’s ok; we can pick up contraceptives at the 7-11! We’ve got another batch of terrible people, but there are a few others who have earned high fives this week. (As usual, trigger warnings for pretty much everything apply.)

After a 2011 law that effectively banned abortion pills was struck down by the Oklahoma Supreme Court, Gov. Mary Fallin has signed a new law to restrict the use of medications to induce abortions by prohibiting off-label use, even though further research has shown that they’re effective later in pregnancy and at lower doses than the initial tests found.

Mississippi has passed a new law that bans abortion 20 weeks after the first day of the mother’s last period, so at a gestational age of only about 18 weeks. It’s almost certainly going to be declared unconstitutional, just like every other bill that bans abortion before viability at about 24 weeks.

A new Alaska law limits the reasons that a doctor can declare an abortion to be “medically necessary” for Medicaid to cover it. There is no option to protect the mental health of the mother.

Two more Texas doctors have had their hospital admitting privileges revoked because they provide abortions and the association damages the hospital’s reputation. Their privileges have been temporarily reinstated pending a hearing; it’s a violation of federal and state law for hospitals to discriminate against doctors who perform abortion (it still happens, but most of the time they’re smart enough to pretend it’s for a different reason).

Under pressure from religious leaders, the Colorado legislature has withdrawn the proposed Reproductive Health Freedom Act that would have prohibited the passage of laws that interfere with reproductive health choices.

Nine Pennsylvania colleges have been sued under Title IX for discriminating against female athletes.

Schools really need to cool it with their dress code rules that force students to dress according to their gender. Most recently, an Illinois high school told students that they wouldn’t be able to participate in graduation ceremonies unless “females… wear dresses or skirts” along with dressy shoes or sandals, while “[m]ales are required to wear slacks, shirt and a tie.” In North Carolina, meanwhile, a girl was kicked out of prom for wearing skinny jeans instead of a dress.

When researchers sent out letters to 6,500 faculty members around the U.S. posing as prospective doctoral students who wanted to talk about research opportunities, the letters signed with a white-sounding male name got more replies than the letters purportedly from women or minorities.

Terrible people of the week!

• Terry Richardson, for his entire existence allegedly texting model Emma Appleton to say he’d shoot her for Vogue if she had sex with him. Vogue, meanwhile, has denied that they have any plans to work with him again and Richardson claims that he never sent the text.
• Alex Graves, the director of the most recent episode of Game of Thrones, for thinking that he’d filmed a consensual sex scene when it was clearly a rape.
• Cardinal Dolan, who said he’s “inspired” by the Hobby Lobby case because women can just “walk into a 7-11” to pick up contraceptives.
• The idiots who don’t understand that Chelsea Clinton can be pro-choice and still happy to be pregnant. Surprise! We have babies too, if we choose to.
• All sorts of conservative columnists and pundits who called Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor “legally illiterate” and “emotional” because she disagreed with the court’s decision that it was constitutional for Michigan to allow voters to ban affirmative action.
• The jackasses at Tankhead Custom Tees, who sold the following shirt at WonderCon (and who “apologized” by saying that they hated fanboys too, but “real” fans are ok).

High fives!

• To Emma Stone for calling out Andrew Garfield’s dumb sexist joke about sewing being “feminine” and turning it into a teachable moment.
• To the people who take to Twitter during Tampa Bay Rays games to remind people that pitcher Josh Lueke is a rapist.
• To the 69% of respondents in a recent survey who are in favor of the contraceptive mandate.
• To Jon Stewart, for absolutely eviscerating Republican sexism against Hillary Clinton. (Though I could live with the joke about Pres. Taft being pregnant.)

Australian musician Iggy Azalea has decided to stop crowd-surfing during concerts because fans would try to sexually assault her, even tweeting at her before concerts to let her know that they couldn’t wait to finger her.

Kim Novak has spoken out about the abuse she received after her appearance at the Oscars and says that she had fasted for three days before the ceremony and had to take anti-anxiety meds to be able to go onstage.

Four former Buffalo Bills cheerleaders have sued the team and their management company for failing to pay them for many of the appearances they made in violation of minimum wage laws.

Sigh. A new survey found that not only are boys more likely to earn an allowance than girls, they also receive more money than girls even though on average they do fewer chores.

Recommended Reading

• A reminder that while the suffragettes were instrumental in gaining the vote and other rights for women, they were racist as all fuck.
• However, you definitely should not read the drivel Thought Catalog published that claims that women were better off before the feminist movement because we had it so much better than men, who had to live in fear of the draft, and that feminists are whiny brats (unless they’re cops or soldiers).
• Jill Filipovic discusses how NGOs and aid organizations are failing women around the world because they’re either outright banned from mentioning abortion in order to keep their funding or they disapprove of it. Never mind that unsafe abortions kill thousands of women every year.
• When researchers actually talked to underage sex workers in NYC and Atlantic City, they found that far fewer were working for pimps than most people believe and that most hadn’t been trafficked, so laws that target pimps and sex traffickers don’t address the real issues most of them face (though they do help some).
• Why do so many colleges and universities hesitate to call rape “rape” and instead substitute euphemisms like “nonconsensual sex” in their policies? Though that’s still better than the Christian colleges who claim that they don’t have to comply with federal laws about protecting rape victims because they don’t accept federal money.
• How the myth of all rapists and murderers as “monsters” can make it harder to sympathize with victims since “most perpetrators of violence are normal men.”
• Jessica Valenti argues that women aren’t being held back by a “confidence gap;” we just know that the system is rigged against us. I suspect it’s both.
• An interview with NPR’s Nina Totenberg about what it was like to be the only woman in a newsroom.
• What are misogynistic geeks so afraid of?
• Young women are the fastest-growing demographic of comic book readers.
• On the brilliant and intentional misandry of Orphan Black, which has some of the best female characters on TV (and some of the most inept straight men).
• “The Great List of Things I Can’t Do Because I Only Have Daughters.” (Don’t worry, the headline is sarcastic and this is actually awesome.)
• I laughed WAY too hard at Sam Killermann’s suggestion for a sign to reduce confusion as to who can use gender neutral bathrooms.