Dare To Be A Feminist

Naomi Sayers is an Indigenous feminist from the Garden River First Nations, just east of Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, who has also worked as a sex worker in the north of Canada. Naomi shared with A Kiss for Gabriela that some of her current work advocating for the rights of Indigenous people in the sex trade springs from a 2012 workshop organized by the sex worker organization Maggie’s in Toronto on public education and challenging stigma. After attending the workshop, Naomi started telling her own story using her own words and sharing about her own experiences in sex work, challenging the messages she had heard for so many years from authority figures–counselors, doctors, nurses, and the justice system–that indigenous women are victims and incapable of deciding what is right for them.

Pivot is looking for a full-time staff lawyer to lead our sex workers’ rights campaign.
About You

You are a passionate, trans-positive, feminist lawyer with a deep understanding of the human rights issues faced by sex workers in Canada and the fight for decriminalization of adult sex work.

The FOX spin machine was working overtime on October 21, and the goal was to convince every young woman that she isn’t smart enough to vote – because young, single women tend to vote for Democrats.

Ladies, are you ready to vote? Your role in an election is about much more than marking a ballot. You need to know your voting rights and learn about the midterm election before you vote. Read more »

NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER! Shipping mid-November 2014.

LiartownUSA is proud to offer a full-color, glossy, 12” x 12” wall calendar, painstakingly crafted to honor and celebrate our bravest, most productive modern heroes: ONLINE SOCIAL JUSTICE ACTIVISTS.

What began as an imaginary calendar on a blog post is now the first Liartown artifact to respectfully and consensually enter the real world. Hailed as “the absolute best cat calendar!” by none other than Jezebel.com, this impressive calendar showcases 12 absolutely precious kittens, each carefully selected through a grueling audition process. Unlike bland, privileged garbage kittens chosen for nothing more than shallow good looks, Social Justice Kittens radiate fierce strength in the face of untold adversity, and all are gifted with a dazzling array of genders and orientations to go with their tiny, oh-so-kissable faces! THE STATUS QUO WILL NEVER FULLY ACCEPT THESE KITTENS!

After thousands of years of cis-het, patriarchal BULLSHIT, here’s a calendar that DARES YOU to speak truth to power. A calendar which boldly announces to the world that you aren’t going to sit back and let others speak for you. A calendar that holds you up high so others can see you’re able to stand proudly on your own. Here at LAST is a calendar that urges you to lean in really close and actually drink the sweet, pathetic tears RIGHT OFF YOUR OPPRESSORS’ STUBBLED CHEEKS!

Each month features a charming kitten professionally photographed in a heroic pose appropriate to a small cat defiantly speaking out on the hottest social justice issues of the day. A sassy, challenging declaration erases any doubts about each cat’s passionate rejection of the dominant paradigm.

In the end, the choice is simple: financially support the ideals embodied by this treasured, unique gift, or refuse to purchase a copy and become one of those hateful fake allies who actively embrace injustice and murder.

Today begins a weekly series of posts about white women and white feminism.  There is something troubling to me in the pattern of white women’s behavior and white feminism’s response to inequality that I want …

his “Women: Like men, only cheaper” image should look familiar–we’ve sarcastically used to“celebrate” Equal Pay Day in the past. But an Australian tech executive was all-too-serious when he included it as a slide during his talk at a tech conference recently. Evan Thornleye explained how “forward-thinking” people such as himself can take advantage of the wage gap by hiring qualified women “for relatively cheap.” 

Sex, or fear of it, has been almost as important in the construction of this nightmare state as racism. Just as the legal gains of the civil rights movement were blunted by LBJ’s Safe Streets Act and the incipient “war on drugs,” the sexual revolution and women’s liberation were short-circuited by serial sex panics, police power in loco mariti, Victims’ Rights as a mask for vengeance and the conception of the Sex Offender as a new, utterly damnable category of human being. It’s significant that the police state’s expansion in the late 1960s–70s coincided not only with the blowing winds of freedom and conservative backlash but with the falling rate of profit. Twenty years on, with the welfare state exhausted, the punishment state found its greatest champion in Bill Clinton, whose neoliberal down escalator for the working class required a vast reserve army of unemployed. Capitalism needed the penitentiary. It always has. Old fears in new skins helped oil the machinery.

Clinton gave his violence program a twist of identity politics—enhanced penalties for violence against women, hate as an actionable emotion, child protection as a blanket for censorship and repression—but those who backed him were not simply gulled. For years before—and each side for its own reasons—some liberals had made common cause with some conservatives on policing sex. “Carceral feminists,” the subject of a fair amount of recent talk and scholarship on the roots of anti-trafficking campaigns, is an unlovely phrase, but it usefully denotes a social force that elided personal power with state power, eschewed the project of liberation—the goal of a radically different set of power relations—and took as its armor the victim’s mantle.

In which I introduce RH Reality Check's latest venture: MY BLOG.

States With More Abortion Laws Have Less Support For Women And Children’s Health: Report

Read closely, fellas.

Women, like men, have the right to move throughout the world without constantly fearing for their safety, yet the burden of prevention continues to fall squarely on women's shoulders. One can't help but wonder, what would it look like if we talked to men about rape prevention in the same way we talk to women?