This Week in Misogyny is Drinking MRA Tears

Raise your hand if you’re mad as hell at the Supreme Court right about now. Yup, thought so. To find out who else you should be mad at this week, let’s take a look at the rest of the news. (As usual, trigger warnings for pretty much everything apply.)

Well, fuck. SCOTUS ruled unanimously against the Massachusetts law that established a 35-foot buffer zone around abortion clinics. At least they didn’t say that buffer zones can’t be used at all, just that this specific one was too big and that other ordinances could have been enforced instead. And of course, the court still gets to keep its much larger buffer zone. But still, fuck.

Congress might actually pass a bill to expand abortion access. Right now Peace Corps volunteers can’t get abortions covered by their government insurance at all, but new bill would grant exemptions in the case of rape, incest, or if the woman’s life was in danger.

President Obama hosted a summit on working families this week, but it still doesn’t look like any major changes are necessarily on the agenda.

Google just launched the Made with Code initiative to encourage girls to learn computer science. Looks cool!

Related, this ad from Verizon and Makers shows how adults discourage girls from being interested in the sciences.

Terrible People of the Week!

• Robin Thicke. ‘Nuff said.
• George Will, for doubling down on defending his column about how colleges are too hard on rapists by saying that the Internet just makes people get offended too easily and that false allegations will destroy men’s lives.
• The Michigan legislature, which included $800,000 for crisis pregnancy centers in the budget. And again for considering a “heartbeat bill” that would make it a felony to perform abortions once the heartbeat can be detected, which is at about six weeks gestation.
• The online hostesses of the Daytime Emmys, who joked about one young soap star being jail bait until they found out that he is legally an adult and told another actor, “We’re going to get you away from us before we rape you.”
• Gary Oldman, for whining about the PC police and defending the horrible things that Mel Gibson and Alec Baldwin have said.
• Tom Carson, who said Olivia Wilde had too nice an ass to be believable as a writer (or even as literate) in his review of the film Third Person.
• Matt Lauer, who asked Mary Barra if she thought she could do a good job at GM and still be a good mother.
• The Mormon Church, which excommunicated Kate Kelly for being a feminist and wanting women to play an equal role in church leadership.
• The doctors who insisted that Stacey Yepes wasn’t actually sick, just stressed, until she got fed up and videotaped herself having a stroke.

Obviously this is old news, since Marion Zimmer Bradley died 15 years ago, but the Internet has been abuzz this week about the fact that she molested her daughter and defended her husband, who was a child rapist.

Reportedly, NBC refused to run ads for Obvious Child if they mentioned abortion by name, though the network insists that they didn’t specifically say that was why they wouldn’t run them.

Pope Francis may have great PR and may know how to sound like he’s ushering in a new era of progressivism in the Catholic Church, but his policies are the same old sexist, misogynistic bullshit.

Instagram temporarily suspended a mommy blogger’s account after she posted a picture of her toddler with her tummy sticking out over her underwear.

Study Break

• Our society’s emphasis on two-parent households can push women to stay with abusive partners so they aren’t stigmatized as single moms, and institutional sexism blames moms both for trying to get kids away from abusers and for not doing so quickly enough.
• On to cost of women increasingly dropping out of the workforce in their late 40s and 50s in order to care for aging parents.
• Maria Konnikova discusses four studies that explain why women may be penalized if they try to “lean in” and negotiate their compensation.
• A new study about casual sex found that one-night stands can have positive benefits for some people and negative repercussions for others, largely based on their preconceived notions about whether casual sex is awesome or shameful. Unsurprisingly, the group that scored highest in thinking hookups were awesome were asshole men.
• A word recognition study from the Center for Reading Research found that the words that had a wide gap in recognition by people of different genders fell along largely stereotypical lines; women were less likely to know that words like “humvee” and “scimitar” were real, while men didn’t know words like “progesterone” and “taffeta.” (The study didn’t ask them to define the words; just to pick them out from made-up words.)

Recommended Reading

• A response to the blogger who doesn’t want teenagers to post pictures of their boobs (cleavage, really) on social media because she’s afraid her husband will love her less if he sees them.
• American Apparel’s board may have fired Dov Charney, but that doesn’t let them off the hook for putting up with his shenanigans for so long or for their exploitative ads.
• Do summer camps that ban girls from engaging in both positive and negative body talk actually help self-esteem, or do they just make bodies a taboo source of internalized anxiety and shame?
• Childbirth is not a competition. Your kid will be fine if you have an epidermal or C-section.
• Working moms aren’t ruining their kids, either.
• Why are female celebrities judged so much more harshly than their male counterparts, who are frequently forgiven for much more egregious behavior?
• A cool report from the Women in Science Writing: Solutions Summit.
• The hashtag of the week is #NotJustHello; it’s about street harassment.
• I can’t wait to see Inside Out, “Pixar’s first female buddy comedy.”
• A new version of The Magic School Bus is coming to Netflix in 2016, and that’s great news for women in science.
• Jason Porath’s “Rejected Princesses;” historical or mythological women who Disney will probably never make movies about.
• Ladies, are you upset that you can’t expose your nipples at the beach? There’s a bikini for that… sorta. (NSFW pics at link.)
• OMG this is amazing, and the comments are exactly what you’d expect them to be. So many man tears. The Anatomy of a Men’s Rights Activist, at Vice.
• Finally, The Daily Show took on rape culture on campus.