Feminism

In Mexico City, growing numbers of women earn their living as gig workers. As women bear the burden of care work, apps like Uber, Didi, and Rappi offer them flexible working hours, letting them decide when to connect and disconnect from their jobs.

But women in this line of work are not only constantly exposed to road accidents and crime but also suffer from gender-based violence.

Mexico City is a particularly dangerous place for women: on average, nearly 19 women were raped in the city every day in 2022, and the year prior, nearly half of women aged 15 and over were victims of some type of violence. Without proper legal protection, women delivery workers using bicycles, motorbikes, cars, and even the subway to get around the capital have been empowered by collective action and have come together to form a union.

Female gig workers say emergency buttons on their apps do not work. To better protect gig workers, unions and labor rights groups have created WhatsApp support groups, where they can report being victims of a crime or an accident. Female delivery workers have also established “Puntos Naranja” or Orange Spots, a place inside restaurants where they can rest, meet, connect to Wi-Fi, recharge phones, use the bathroom, and ask for help if necessary.

In Mexico City, Puntos Naranja function as gathering spots for members of these WhatsApp groups. These women are also hoping to make progress on labor rights. After two years of negotiations with the government and gig work platforms, a bill is due to be presented before Congress that aims to grant delivery workers and drivers labor groups certain rights, such as access to public healthcare and road accident insurance.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17133326

An absolutely wonderful and deep insight into all the problems with revolutionary and other social movements, from the self serious martyrs that base their ideas on being the hero and get burned out to the rejection of rest, older wisdom and other such things it is a very much necessary message in this time of so much uncertainty.

Know where you are going, not just what you're trying to move away from.

For centuries, people have held mistaken assumptions about the origins of male-dominated societies, writes Angela Saini.

From this mastodon thread, via !anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Women at the margins often face distinct challenges during the decades of their lives spent in perimenopause and postmenopause. For those living in poverty or affected by systemic racism, access to high quality healthcare is historically and abysmally low. With clinical menopause expertise in short supply (about 2,000 certified providers in the U.S.), access to quality care is further exacerbated. This is particularly true for those who rely on Medicaid, approximately 20 percent of all U.S. patients.

Digital healthcare provides one opportunity to break through barriers in the traditional healthcare system. It is crucial to make high-quality menopause care accessible to members across a variety of insurance plans, including Medicaid. But the problem also comes from within the system: Medicaid health plans often express a shocking sentiment to us: “We don’t think this population will be interested.”

"In all countries, we are finding many forms of violence:" One in eight girls and women alive today experienced rape or sexual assault before the age of 18, UN says

In a report released on Thursday, Najat Maalla M’Jid said that violence against children had reached unprecedented levels.

“Millions of children worldwide are victims of physical, sexual, and psychological violence both online and offline, including child labor, child marriage, female genital mutilation, gender-based violence, trafficking, bullying, and cyberbullying, among many others,” she said.

According to the report many more children are vulnerable to violence due to what it calls “multidimensional poverty.”

Half of the world’s children, around one billion, are identified as “at high risk” of being affected by the climate crisis.

One in six young people worldwide are also growing up in conflict zones.

“This is a pivotal moment. Violence against children has reached unprecedented levels, caused by multifaceted and interconnected crises,”, Ms. M’Jid said.

[...]

“The problem currently is that no country is immune, no child is immune. In all countries, we are finding many forms of violence,” Ms. M’Jid stated, adding that “you can have the same child who is victim of various forms of violence in various settings.”

[...]

Figures released by the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF, ahead of International Day of the Girl Child on 11 October, estimate that more than 370 million girls and women alive today, or one in eight, experienced rape or sexual assault before the age of 18.

When ‘non-contact’ forms of sexual violence, such as online or verbal abuse are included, the number of girls and women affected rises to 650 million, according to UNICEF.

[...]

Since returning to power three years ago, the Taliban have been enforcing oppressive laws that violate people’s freedoms and human rights, especially those of women and girls.

But a newly passed “vice and virtue” law goes further. It is among the most repressive and discriminatory measures ever enacted by the Islamist fundamentalist group.

A human rights activist from Afghanistan, and as a scholar working on Afghanistan since 2002, have been documenting the Taliban’s attacks against women for decades.

Tehy say that "the new law seeks to completely silence women in public. They are prohibited from speaking, singing or praying aloud."

"The law also attempts to literally erase them from view, ordering women to cover every part of their body and face in public."

cross-postowane z: https://szmer.info/post/4598214

Funfact: AboTak! is a play of word - Abo is short for "abortion", Tak means "yes", together it will be translated as "just because".

Abortion Without Borders and Abortion Dream Team - the biggest abortion providers network in Poland and Europe opens their own clinic. But it's fully funded by individual donations, so abortionists ask you for support. Any, even the smallest, donation will be a huge help!

If you can organize some kind of fundraiser, like event/auction or anything else, please contact with AboTak via email kontakt@abotak.org

The more they try to ban abortion, the more we expose it to the sun. That's why WE OPEN THE FIRST STATIONARY ABORTION CLINIC IN POLAND! WE ARE OPENING AN ABOTAK CLINIC IN WARSAW!

We call ourselves the Abortion Dream Team, and for years we have been doing much more than the Polish state to expand access to abortion in our country. Eight months have passed since the change of power, and legal abortion or even abortion guidelines from the Ministry of Health are still not in sight. That's why we're not waiting idly for a change, and we're opening a space that will set standards and identify good practices of abortion care, put pressure on the government to introduce appropriate laws, and on doctors to learn how to do surgical abortions in accordance with WHO guidelines. It will also be a space where you can find our colorful sweatshirts and t-shirts, as well as works by Polish female artists and books in the climate of the ABOTAK clinic! But in order for this miracle on the Vistula to come to fruition, we need cash! Contribute to our fundraising for the premises and become an ambassador of ABOTAK clinic!

You can read more about us on our website: https://abotak.org/en/

Over the centuries, physicians have placed migraine in various positions along the mind / body spectrum. Headache experts currently consider migraine a somatic disorder rooted in the brain. But this is a break from the past. Up until thirty years ago, doctors primarily viewed migraine as having both a psychological and a somatic basis. In what follows, I trace these historical understandings of migraine from the nineteenth-century understanding of migraine as a disorder of upper-class intellectuals, to the influential concept of the “migraine personality” in mid-twentieth-century America, and finally to contemporary theories of comorbidity.

[...]

I pay close attention to how, at each historical turn, biomedical discourses come to enact and reinforce cultural narratives about gender, class, and pain via the encoded inclusion of moral character. After all, the credibility and the legitimacy of a disorder — and how much we, as a society, choose to invest in its treatment — is intimately tied to how we perceive the moral character of the patient.

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/17341975

Kate has always stood loud and proud as a voice for body positivity and feminism.

Archived version

They think they can insult women’s intelligence and then win over women voters by pretending to be moderate on reproductive rights. How’s that for dumb?

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have made it abundantly clear that they think Kamala Harris is dumb. But apparently they think that women voters are even dumber.

Never mind that Harris is a law school graduate who was later elected San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general, U.S. senator, and vice president of the United States. Trump commonly casts his opponent as intellectually lacking, calling her “dumb as a rock” and “low IQ” at his rallies, and advancing crude, sexist tropes suggesting that Harris used sex to get ahead professionally. And last week, his running mate took the insult to a crueler level, with collateral humiliating damage.

[...]

Vance on August 29 tweeted a 2007 viral video of a Miss Teen USA contestant who flubbed a question about geography, and added this comment: “BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview.” The contestant, Caite Upton, was only 17 at the time, and was so mortified by the video and the ensuing mockery that she had considered suicide. After Vance’s post dredged up her past, threatening to subject her to more humiliation, Upton posted on X, “Regardless of political beliefs, one thing I do know is that social media and online bullying needs to stop.” She then deleted her account—for reasons we can probably guess. But Vance, when confronted with the troubling history of the video he resurfaced, was unmoved. “I’m not going to apologize for posting a joke,” he said.

It is fair to say, at this point, that Vance and his would-be boss don’t see women as equal in any way to men. They are punch lines. They are targets of insult and ridicule and disdain. Their purpose is to satisfy men sexually—“You can do anything” to them—and provide children. Those who don’t provide children are loathsome cat ladies.

[...]

Earlier this year, Trump referred to his primary opponent Nikki Haley—a woman he once selected as ambassador to the United Nations—as a “birdbrain” and called MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski “dumb as a rock.” Trump is particularly fond of demeaning Black women who have challenged him, calling California Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters “a seriously low IQ person” and saying New York Attorney General Letitia James has “a big, nasty, and ugly mouth”—and, of course, “is a Low IQ individual,” as well. Vance, meanwhile, barely finished fielding backlash against 2021 comments about “childless cat ladies” before two more past interviews surfaced in which he lambasted women who refuse to reproduce. The pair have become a tag team of misogyny.

[...]

Trump’s frantic efforts to finesse his ever-changing position on reproductive rights isn’t helping either. Asked last week how he would vote on a Florida referendum enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution, Trump appeared to back it, saying, “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks,” which is the current cutoff for abortion access in Florida. But after blowback on the right, he said he would oppose the referendum. And on protecting access to in vitro fertilization—an emotional, powerful issue even for some in the anti-abortion camp—Trump is flailing, trying to thwart concerns that so-called “pro-life” state laws will imperil it.

[...]

Trump’s problem with women voters this year, compared to previous election cycles, is that he has both a governing record and a legal record, having been found liable in 2023 for sexually abusing and defaming columnist E. Jean Carroll. Trump may have felt emboldened after winning the 2016 election even after the notorious Access Hollywood tape, but his presidential legacy, including appointing the pivotal Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, can’t be dismissed as locker-room talk.

[...]

Another factor is turnout among women. Reproductive rights ballot initiatives in 10 states in November could motivate more women to vote. Tom Bonier, who analyzes voter registration and turnout, reported a jump in registration among women voters in 13 states that have updated their voter files since July 21, with the increase more than twice that for male voters. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis found that in the three and a half weeks after Harris got into the race, registrations were higher than at the same point four years previously—largely because of women voters.

[...]

But thinking you can hoodwink women voters into believing you respect them and will protect their reproductive rights, after a litany of insults and flip-flops? That’s just dumb.

When a woman starts bleeding out after labor, every second matters. But soon, under a new state law, Louisiana doctors might not be able to quickly access one of the most widely used life-saving medications for postpartum hemorrhage.

The Louisiana Illuminator spoke with several doctors across the state that voiced extreme concern about how the rescheduling of misoprostol as a controlled dangerous substance will impact inpatient care at hospitals. Misoprostol is prescribed in a number of medical scenarios — it’s an essential part of reproductive health care that can be used during emergencies, as well as for miscarriage treatment, labor induction, or intrauterine device (IUD) insertion.

But because it is used for abortion, misoprostol has been targeted by conservatives in Louisiana — an unprecedented move for a medication that routinely saves lives. A controlled dangerous substance has extra barriers for access, which can delay care.

The differences between the U.S. vice-presidential candidates highlight how misogyny in politics fuels the rollback of important rights and democratic freedoms. But it also shows how important it is for male politicians to step up to support rights of women and LGBTQ+ people – not least because men continue to dominate political institutions in most parts of the word.