This Week in Misogyny: The Rest of the News Was Pretty Horrible, Too

Y’all, it has been quite the week. We actually have a little bit of good news, but the rest is pretty bleak. Of course, the killings in Santa Barbara dominated the news (meriting a separate post), but here’s everything else that you might have missed. (As usual, trigger warnings for pretty much everything apply.)

We finally have some potentially good news about the kidnapped Nigerian girls! A representative of the Nigerian military announced that they know where the girls are being held. President Goodluck Jonathan announced Thursday that he was launching a “full-scale operation” to get them back and that his forces were authorized to defeat Boko Haram by “any means necessary.” Four more girls have reportedly escaped on their own and are back with their families, though additional details were not released. Meanwhile, women in two villages managed to rally their community to disarm ten Boko Haram militants who tried to attack them; three escaped, but they lynched the other seven.

Not even 24 hours after the UCSB shooting, another California man fired eight shots at three women who refused to have sex with him and his friends. Fortunately he missed and they were able to escape. Police are still searching for Keith Binder and his friends.

25-year-old Farzana Parveen was beaten to death by her family on the streets of Lahore, Pakistan, because she married against their wishes. A crowd of male onlookers, including her own father, failed to intervene. She was three months pregnant and had been planning to testify that her husband had not kidnapped her as her family claimed; she had married willingly.

Aaron Aranza has been arrested in Houston for whipping his 14-year-old daughter with a belt after he learned that she planned to dance with a black friend at her quinceañera.

Iranian actress Leila Hatami issued a formal apology after there was an outcry and calls for her public flogging because of a picture that circulated of her greeting the president of the Cannes film festival with a kiss on the cheek (even though she had tried to just shake hands with him).

Nicole Guerrero filed a federal lawsuit against Wichita County, Texas, this week because she alleges that in June 2012 she was left in solitary confinement without medical assistance while in labor; her baby wasn’t breathing at birth due to having the umbilical cord around its neck and was later pronounced dead at a hospital.

Well, at least Google admitted that almost all of their employees are white and a large majority are men.

When the fuck are some people who work at bars going to get the message that domestic beer/domestic violence jokes aren’t fucking funny? This week’s offender was Scruffy Duffies in Plano, TX; the owners have apologized, suspended the manager who refused to remove it after patrons complained, and donated money to a local shelter servicing domestic violence victims.

Terrible people of the week

• Glenn Beck, for airing a skit about how us silly wimmenz are always calling things rape when they’re totally not. And doubly so for replaying it in response to the discussion of how misogyny contributed to the UC Santa Barbara killings.
• Katie Pavlich, who claimed during a discussion of #YesAllWomen on Outnumbered that “This issue is not about women and I think it’s kind of insulting for women to go on Twitter and talk about how them getting hit on in the bar is equal to being shot in the street, because it’s not.”
• Mollie Henderson, who wrote an article on the right-wing site The Federalist titled “The Ten Most Asinine Things About #YesAllWomen.” One of her complaints is that it got hijacked by “Islamic theocrats.” Bitch, do you even Twitter? Every popular hashtag gets hijacked!
• Dr. Keith Ablow, who thinks it’s “crazy” that men can’t stop women from having abortions.
• Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy. During a Fox & Friends segment, Doocy said that the key to a happy relationship is to just “Yes, dear” your wife in order to derail arguments. Kilmeade almost got it right when he pointed out that that’s condescending, but he didn’t shut up fast enough and in his examples of how to argue, recommended calling your wife “baby doll” and baby cakes.” (And an honorable mention eyeroll to Elizabeth Hasselbeck for agreeing with him instead of pointing out that he was being condescending too.)
• Pat Robertson, who thinks that husbands should be rewarded with sex if they do chores around the house.
• Screenwriter David S. Goyer, who went off on a rant about comic book character She-Hulk in which he called her “a giant green porn star that only the Hulk could fuck.” Which, besides being grossly misogynistic, Hulk and She-Hulk are cousins! And she’s a feminist hero! Later in the podcast, he jokingly asked if the audience members who had heard of Martian Manhunter if they were virgins.
• DC Comics, which just released a series of “bombshell” variant covers, every single one of which has a sexualized woman (even if she’s not even active in the series right now).
• “Big Earl” Cheney, who told a gay couple that they were banned from returning to his East Texas restaurant because they only serve men who “act like men” and women who “act like ladies.”
• Evan Spiegel, cofounder and CEO of Snapchat, whose leaked emails are chock-full of bro bullshit.
• Heineken and Brazilian store Shoestock, who teamed up to offer a shoe discount to women during last weekend’s European championship soccer game. Because men need to watch the game in peace and women love shoe-shopping! Except that more Brazilian women than men tuned in for the 2010 World Cup.
• Officials at Wastach High School in Utah who photoshopped some female students’ yearbook pictures to make them more modest, raising the necklines of some low-cut shirts and adding sleeves to tank tops.
• The officials at Mundy’s Mill High School in Georgia who want to ban the senior class vice-president from graduation because her high school yearbook quote was, “When the going gets tough, just remember to Barium Carbon Potassium Thorium Astatine Arsenic Sulfer[sic] Utranium[sic] Phospheros[sic].” If you convert those elements to their chemical symbols, it spells “BaCK ThAt AsS UP,” but she didn’t actually use profanity in the yearbook. (Now, I can see if they were upset that she spelled three of the elements’ names incorrectly…)

I’m actually not going to give Seth Rogen a slot on the terrible person list this week. Yeah, he didn’t react very well when film critic Ann Hornaday said films like Neighbors might contribute to some men feeling left out of frat-boy hijinks, but Hornaday later clarified that she didn’t mean it to sound like she was actually blaming him for the shooting. Rogen actually had the early drafts of the script changed so that his character’s wife wasn’t “just another humorless, nagging wife.”

High fives to Neko Case for her epic Twitter smackdown of a sexist Playboy tweet about her.

Body-positivity blogger Monica Tonjes is taking on Instagram’s double standards after the temporarily took down one of her butt selfies for violating “mature content” rules, even though they allow butt pictures of thinner women without question.

Study break!

• A study of more than 20,000 articles published by the New York Times on their website between October 23, 2013 and February 25, 2014 found that only 34% had a woman listed as the first author. Breaking it down by topic, women only wrote the majority of articles in the Fashion, Dining, Home, Travel, and Health sections.
• This is depressing — a study of how income is affected by high school GPAs found that women who graduated with a 4.0 earned about the same amount as men with a 2.0.
• Women who speak with a vocal fry may have trouble getting hired; a new study found that both men and women were dubbed less trustworthy when speaking with the affectation compared to when they spoke with their normal voice, but women were rated more negatively.
• Girls whose fathers do housework (and thus model that traditional gender roles are unimportant) are more likely to aspire to be doctors and lawyers instead of traditionally female jobs like teachers and nurses.
• Slut-shaming among college girls happens largely along class lines, with rich girls putting down poorer students for having sex and not being “classy.”
• A new study of over 300 college students found a correlation between the reading men’s magazines that dole out dubious sex advice and a tendency toward nonconsensual sexual activity and pursuit. (Though, they couldn’t say if the magazines were contributing to the behaviors or if they’re just popular among guys who are already shitheads.)
• I don’t even know what to say about this study that asked people to rate women’s attractiveness based on pictures of just their faces, their bodies while wearing street clothes, and their bodies while wearing bikinis.

Recommended Reading

• On the “friend zone” and how pick-up artists teach men that they’re innocent victims of heartless women.
• One reason men can be so shocked when women talk about misogyny is that many perpetrators are careful not to act in front of other men.
• Arthur Chu on the misogyny in nerd culture.
• The heartbreaking statistics regarding violence against women.
• The new Tumblr When Women Refuse is “collecting stories of violence inflicted on women who reject sexual advances.”
• Amber Hubert talks about how a lifetime of being taught to be polite led to an unexpected penis in her hand at the end of a bad date.
• Dr. Willie Parker explains why his Christianity leads him to provide abortions; he’s one of the few doctors to still do them up to 24 weeks and he even travels from Alabama to Mississippi to work at multiple clinics.
• A reminder that women don’t become “single moms” if their husband goes out of town or has a meeting during the kids’ bedtime.
• This is a really cool discussion of the use of “she” as a gender-neutral pronoun in Ann Leckie’s Nebula Award-winning novel Ancillary Justice.
• Why We Need Fewer Man-Boys And More Woman-Girls In Film.
• Kitty Pryde is not happy that they gave all her action to Wolverine in the new X-Men movie.
• Is the word “girl” offensive? Depends on the context.
• Zerlina Maxwell lists “7 actual facts that prove white privilege exists in America.”
• Hahahahaha, misandry sex tips!