#global women's rights

[humanitarianproject]

Global Women's Rights | Humanitarian Project

Global women's rights advancement is our mission at Humanitarian Project. Through advocacy, education, and support services, we hope to empower women through our projects. We invite you to join us in our efforts to advance gender parity and build a society in which all women can prosper. When we work together, we may leave a lasting impression.

[taviamoth]

[ms-hells-bells]

at the very core of trump's likely victory is men. young, old, everything in between. they are so spite filled, particularly regarding women's rights, that they want not just a trump victory, but a conservative house, senate and (to maintain a) supreme court in order to reduce and revoke what they see as 'women stepping out of their place' and 'what they have stolen that is rightfully ours'.

not even two thirds and more of voting women voting for harris was enough, because it comes down to the electoral college, which favours the red states, and those red states have bounds of conservative men.

[thurio-edau]

"in our school today, we did a project to raise awareness. we pinned purple ribbons to those who wanted to help in about the recent events regarding women's rights and safety in Turkiye, and a lot of people asked to have one. my clothes weren't fit to pin it however i wore it on my wrist nevertheless.

we would like this project to continue in other cities, other schools. if you cannot pin it, wear it. the government is banning the broadcast of the events but from one simple internet search you can read about the horrifying events happened lately.

we need to spread awareness. this cannot continue. we are planning to continue the project next week as well. please do not ignore, because Turkish women are in danger."

do not ignore.

one reblog, and some tags, is all it takes to help.

please help those in need.

[poetessinthepit]

Some facts for those who want to purplewash Palestinian society and portray it as anti-women:

- Palestine has one of the highest percentages of educated women in both the MENA region and the world. Palestinian culture encourages women to get university degrees, and this is not a recent development but something that has become the norm over the last 50 years.

- Women across Palestine have had active involvement in resistance movements for over a 100 years, and during the first Intifada, the women's liberation movement played a vital leadership role with women fighting both for their rights as women and as Palestinians. Palestinian women during the first intifada invented some pretty ingenious organizing strategies, such as disguising their political meetings as homemaking groups and hiding their political pamphlets in loaves of bread.

- There is no mandatory hjiab anywhere in Palestine aside from some high school dress codes in Gaza.

None of this is to say that Palestinian society is not a patriarchal society deserving of feminist critique, but it is to say the picture of Palestinian women painted by Israeli propaganda is not accurate, and any assumption that it is accurate is easily impressed upon ignorant westerners who see muslim majority nations as a total monolith.

[feministdragon]

gyns, new book just dropped

by which I mean, Maria Mies just died this year, and I didn't know anything about her or her work????? how did I not fucking know about this book that was published in 1986???? This should be part of the main radfem cannon.

Vandana Shiva said about Maria Mies:

"Maria showed us that capitalist patriarchy is an extractive economy that extracts the value women create and creates the illusion that capital is the creative force that creates wealth."

anyways, sharing with you all

edited to add that the borrow linked above is unavailable, here’s a direct (safe) link to a pdf

[reasonsforhope]

"If I wanted to convince you of the reality of human progress, of the fact that we as a species have advanced materially, morally, and politically over our time on this planet, I could quote you chapter and verse from a thick stack of development statistics.

I could tell you that a little more than 200 years ago, nearly half of all children born died before they reached their 15th birthday, and that today it’s less than 5 percent globally. I could tell you that in pre-industrial times, starvation was a constant specter and life expectancy was in the 30s at best. [Note: This is average life expectancy, old people did still exist in olden times] I could tell you that at the dawn of the 19th century, barely more than one person in 10 was literate, while today that ratio has been nearly reversed. I could tell you that today is, on average, the best time to be alive in human history.

But that doesn’t mean you’ll be convinced.

In one 2017 Pew poll, a plurality of Americans — people who, perhaps more than anywhere else, are heirs to the benefits of centuries of material and political progress — reported that life was better 50 years ago than it is today. A 2015 survey of thousands of adults in nine rich countries found that 10 percent or fewer believed that the world was getting better. On the internet, a strange nostalgia persists for the supposedly better times before industrialization, when ordinary people supposedly worked less and life was allegedly simpler and healthier. (They didn’t and it wasn’t.)

Looking backward, we imagine a halcyon past that never was; looking forward, it seems to many as if, in the words of young environmental activist Greta Thunberg, “the world is getting more and more grim every day.”

So it’s boom times for doom times. But the apocalyptic mindset that has gripped so many of us not only understates how far we’ve come, but how much further we can still go. The real story of progress today is its remarkable expansion to the rest of the world in recent decades. In 1950, life expectancy in Africa was just 40; today, it’s past 62. Meanwhile more than 1 billion people have moved out of extreme poverty since 1990 alone.

But there’s more to do — much more. That hundreds of millions of people still go without the benefit of electricity or live in states still racked by violence and injustice isn’t so much an indictment of progress as it is an indication that there is still more low-hanging fruit to harvest.

The world hasn’t become a better place for nearly everyone who lives on it because we wished it so. The astounding economic and technological progress made over the past 200 years has been the result of deliberate policies, a drive to invent and innovate, one advance building upon another. And as our material condition improved, so, for the most part, did our morals and politics — not as a side effect, but as a direct consequence. It’s simply easier to be good when the world isn’t zero-sum.

Which isn’t to say that the record of progress is one of unending wins. For every problem it solved — the lack of usable energy in the pre-fossil fuel days, for instance — it often created a new one, like climate change. But just as a primary way climate change is being addressed is through innovation that has drastically reduced the price of clean energy, so progress tends to be the best route to solving the problems that progress itself can create.

The biggest danger we face today, if we care about actually making the future a more perfect place, isn’t that industrial civilization will choke on its own exhaust or that democracy will crumble or that AI will rise up and overthrow us all. It’s that we will cease believing in the one force that raised humanity out of tens of thousands of years of general misery: the very idea of progress.

Changing Humanity's "Normal" Forever

Progress may be about where we’re going, but it’s impossible to understand without returning to where we’ve been. So let’s take a trip back to the foreign country that was the early years of the 19th century.

In 1820, according to data compiled by the historian Michail Moatsos, about three-quarters of the world’s population earned so little that they could not afford even a tiny living space, some heat and, hopefully, enough food to stave off malnutrition.

It was a state that we would now call “extreme poverty,” except that for most people back then, it wasn’t extreme — it was simply life.

What matters here for the story of progress isn’t the fact that the overwhelming majority of humankind lived in destitution. It’s that this was the norm, and had been the norm since essentially… forever. Poverty, illiteracy, premature death — these weren’t problems, as we would come to define them in our time. They were simply the background reality of being human, as largely unchangeable as birth and death itself...

Between 10,000 BCE and 1700, the average global population growth rate was just 0.04 percent per year. And that wasn’t because human beings weren’t having babies. They were simply dying, in great numbers: at birth, giving birth, in childhood from now-preventable diseases, and in young adulthood from now-preventable wars and violence.

It was only with the progress of industrialization that we broke out of [this long cycle], producing enough food to feed the mounting billions, enough scientific breakthroughs to conquer old killers like smallpox and the measles, and enough political advances to dwindle violent death.

Between 1800 and today, our numbers grew from around 1 billion to 8 billion. And that 8 billion aren’t just healthier, richer, and better educated. On average, they can expect to live more than twice as long. The writer Steven Johnson has called this achievement humanity’s “extra life” — but that extra isn’t just the decades that have been added to our lifespans. It’s the extra people that have been added to our numbers. I’m probably one of them, and you probably are too...

The progress we’ve earned has hardly been uninterrupted or perfectly distributed... [But] once we could prove in practice that the lot of humanity didn’t have to be hand-to-mouth existence, we could see that progress could continue to expand.

Current Progress "Flows Overwhelmingly" to the Developing World

The long twentieth century came late to the Global South, but it did get there. Between 1960 and today, India and China, together home to nearly one in every three people alive today, have seen life expectancy rise from 45 to 70 and 33 to 78, respectively. Per-capita GDP over those years rose some 2,600 percent for India and an astounding 13,400 percent for China, with the latter lifting an estimated 800 million people out of extreme poverty.

In the poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa, progress has been slower and later, but shouldn’t be underestimated. When we see the drastic decline in child mortality — which has fallen since 1990 from 18.1 percent of all children in that region to 7.4 percent in 2021 — or the more than 20 million measles deaths that have been prevented since 2000 in Africa alone, this is progress continuing to happen now, with the benefits overwhelmingly flowing to the poorest among us.

Vanishing Autocracies

In 1800, according to Our World in Data, zero — none, nada, zip — people lived in what we would now classify as a liberal democracy. Just 22 million people — about 2 percent of the global population — lived in what the site classifies as “electoral autocracies,” meaning that what democracy they had was limited, and limited to a subset of the population.

One hundred years later, things weren’t much better — there were actual liberal democracies, but fewer than 1 percent of the world’s population lived in them...

Today just 2 billion people live in countries that are classified as closed autocracies — relatively few legal rights, no real electoral democracy — and most of them are in China...

Expanding Human Rights

All you have to do is roll the clock back a few decades to see the way that rights, on the whole, have been extended wider and wider: to LGBTQ citizens, to people of color, to women. The fundamental fact is that as much as the technological and economic world of 2023 would be unrecognizable to people in 1800, the same is true of the political world.

Nor can you disentangle that political progress from material progress. Take the gradual but definitive emancipation of women. That has been a hard-fought, ongoing battle, chiefly waged by women who saw the inherent unfairness of a male-dominated society.

But it was aided by the invention of labor-saving technologies in the home like washing machines and refrigerators that primarily gave time back to women and made it easier for them to move into the workforce.

These are all examples of the expansion of the circle of moral concern — the enlargement of who and what is considered worthy of respect and rights, from the foundation of the family or tribe all the way to humans around the world (and increasingly non-human animals as well). And it can’t be separated from the hard fact of material progress.

Leaving a Zero-Sum World Behind

The pre-industrial world was a zero-sum one... In a zero-sum world, you advance only at the expense of others, by taking from a set stock, not by adding, which is why wars of conquest between great powers were so common hundreds of years ago, or why homicide between neighbors was so much more frequent in the pre-industrial era.

We have obviously not eradicated violence, including by the state itself. But a society that can produce more of what it needs and wants is one that will be less inclined to fight over what it has, either with its neighbors or with itself. It’s not that the humans of 2023 are necessarily better, more moral, than their ancestors 200 or more years ago. It’s that war and violence cease to make economic sense...

Doomerism, at its heart, may be that exhaustion made manifest.

But just as we need continued advances in clean tech or biosecurity to protect ourselves from some of the existential threats we’ve inadvertently created, so do we need continued progress to address the problems that have been with us always: of want, of freedom, even of mortality. Nothing can dispel the terminal exhaustion that seems endemic in 2023 better than the idea that there is so much more left to do to lift millions out of poverty and misery while protecting the future — which is possible, thanks to the path of the progress we’ve made.

And we’ll know we’re successful if our descendants can one day look back on the present with the same mix of sympathy and relief with which we should look back on our past. How, they’ll wonder, did they ever live like that?"

-via Vox, 3/20/23

Note: I would seriously recommend reading the whole article--because as long as this post is, this is only about half of it! The article contains a lot more information about the hows and whys of human progress, and it also definitely made me cry the first time I read it.

[she-is-ovarit]

It doesn't matter how many oppressor groups she belongs to. It does not matter how privileged she is on the axis of class, race, nationality, ability, etc. It doesn't matter what her politics are or how much of a horrible human being she is.

She still doesn't deserve rape. Rape is still not an act of liberation, justice, or self-defense. If you think any woman deserves rape, you are a rape apologist. If you think there are any exceptions to sexual violence towards any individual or group of female human beings, there's a disturbance with your core sense of morality and you are not safe to be around.

[exdivine]

white supremacy and misogyny work hand-in-hand to keep patriarchal power systems in place, if you fail to acknowledge this you’re not a radical feminist

[taviamoth]

[The first video shows people marching at night. The second video shows a group of women praying.]

🚨 A mass march has erupted now headed towards the zionist embassy in the Jordanian capital of Amman in anger at the IOF's crimes in Gaza—including the rape and killing of women, the siege of Al-Shifa Hospital, and the violations of Al-Aqsa—and in support of the resistance.

Meanwhile, women staged a sit-in to denounce the occupation's crimes and support the women of Gaza.

[vividdreamer]

i think there's something really sad and also really scary about coming to terms with the fact that my future is not going to be about succeeding in my career, finding love, and moving to a big city because in reality nothing will be waiting for me. i am going to be a climate refugee stuck in poverty and isolation.

religion, parental abuse and patriarchy stole my childhood and youth from me. now, capitalism has stolen my future from me. i'm being told not to despair, but im sorry. its too late. and im not forgiving the ones who did this. if hell is real, i hope you rot there.

[hussyknee]

Regular reminder that if you don't live in the Global North, nothing they have to say applies to the rest of us. Actually most things they say have little value anyway since the Global South and Eastern folks are afterthoughts to them, much less center us in their social justice.

- The USAmerican cultural hegemony has fuck all to do with us. Be aware of what they're trying to peddle you, but they have more power to harm and radicalise you than you have ever could to harm them. This applies to both the Western left and right wing. They are both equally racist, colonial and imperialist.

- Global North issues around capitalism, exploitation and piracy have nothing to do with us. Consumer activism might work to some extent over there idk, but if anyone brings it up over in the lands of the Black and brown people, you can laugh them out of the country.

- Their queer history is not ours. Congrats to Stonewall and all but that's just some shit that happened in the US. We need to dig past 18 different strata of cultural genocide and colonial garbage to mine our queer histories back into the light, and designing microlabel flags and fighting over colonizer language acronyms have fuck all to do with that either.

- Always pirate everything within reach. Save up and buy from authors and creators you really like (that's what I do – esp when it's a BIPOC creator), but people who can't afford to buy shit in the first place ain't stealing food out of anybody's mouths. Pirating is praxis and always has been since the days of the East India Company.

- Don't buy into the USAmerican theories of race. They aren't universal. "BIPOC" especially is a USAmerican specific term, it is not used in the UK or other settler colonies. Constructs of race and the tribal Other far predated European colonization; race as a colour system that exists today is simply one variation of it. The global apartheid against the mellanated takes many forms, histories and terminology. There are especially no "people of colour" in Asia, Africa, Caribbean and Polynesia. There are only people who live there, and "people of white".

Race is a fake, made-up conceptualization imposed by whoever has power within each region. It's ethnic, cultural and casteist, with no biological basis whatsoever. There is no uniformity, no universalism, no rhyme nor reason to any of it; the only people who know exactly who doesn't belong are the oppressors. I'm seeing concepts like "unambiguously black" floating around the terminally online Western left; any dark-skinned person of the Global South should split their sides laughing at it. Whites have no ambiguity on who the darkies are.

- Read, watch, listen to, play whatever the hell you want, just have the sense to pirate it, and to be very conscious about the narratives they try to smuggle.

- When the US and UK speak, listen with compassionate interest, offer what solidarity you can spare for their downtrodden, and then go back to reading and following your own fucking news. Focus on our own women's and reproductive rights, trans rights, queer histories, rise of fascism, militarisation, anti-blackness, class warfare, nationalist violence, imperialism etc. That is decolonization, that is emancipation from the Western cultural hegemony. Everything else is the bread and circuses of empire, in which both the left and right wing of the West are complicit.

We owe the Global North nothing more than we can each individually afford to extend to them on grounds of common human decency and compassion. Which is a lot more than they will ever reciprocate.

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

@manar._.mattar and her family have become very dear to me over the many months we’ve corresponded. I ask everyone who sees this to go to her profile and 💸 whatever you can, and if you can make even a small recurring donation, please do. The family fundraiser is also in my Linktree in my bio.

Text:

HELP MANAR, MOHAMMED, AND ROSE SURVIVE & AID THEIR NEIGHBORS!

Manar and Mohammed welcomed their little girl, Rose, into a living nightmare. Their home and dental office were destroyed by Israeli missiles and they have been displaced numerous times, narrowly avoiding slaughter and enduring the trauma of Mohammed being injured by shrapnel.

Rose is now a happy eight-month-old, but Manar recently discovered Rose is lactose intolerant - making finding milk and food for her even more costly.

Manar despairs at how little their fundraiser has grown. She hopes that with our help, she can not only feed her own family but help distribute milk to other families with infants in her area.

LET’S HELP MANAR HELP HER COMMUNITY!

GFM: https://gofund.me/09796ec0

PayPal: Rokaya Rubi @200678253

https://gofund.me/09796ec0

[nando161mando]

Fascists march in Croatia in support of the Ustaše, the nazi collaborationist mass group that killed over a million Serbs. Against European fascism, a united Global South is needed.

[hellshire-harlot]

I swear to god the Resident Evil fandom has like. Five jokes total. And we won’t shut up about them.

Jill Sandwich (classic but very overdone)

Seven Minutes (I’m so sick of this line fr)

Chris punching a boulder (we’re right to meme on that honestly)

Lady Dimitrescu (Most of those jokes are pretty gross actually)

Where’s Everyone Going? (Bingo?)

[she-is-ovarit]

The intersection of male supremacy and white supremacy: Sperm donation corruption and rape by deception of women.

Jonathan Jacob Meijer.

(There is a Netflix documentary: Man with 1000 kids)

Several women went to this Norwegian man seeking a sperm donor. He had great hair. He had great teeth. He traveled and made Youtube blogs of everywhere he went, to all of these different countries. These women went through a private website as opposed to a clinic. He told these women that his intentions were to donate to a maximum of five families.

As they began getting pregnant and giving birth, some bumped into each other. And what a funny coincidence it was that they happened to share the same donor. And then more met and knew of each other. And some realized that their kids were in the same day camp together, and what were the odds of that?

And as it turns out, this man was operating under several different aliases and traveling internationally, donating to 11 different sperm banks under different names, providing sperm privately for women on the side. And he didn't just donate to five women, he donated to hundreds of women, many of whom connected with each other over social media and formed an online group where all were concerned with what he was doing. And this resulted in thousands of children directly related to this man internationally.

And he didn't just use his sperm, but would also meet up with his bald scarred friend and mix their sperm together in the sample bottle, so many of these women non-consensually conceived children with a man they had never even heard of without realizing it. And him and his buddy and other serial donors would "joke" that they were spreading their "white seed" when they would travel to places like Hong Kong and Kenya.

When he was finally tried in court he stated that if there was concern about incest, the children can all simply wear and use a social media symbol that brands them as his so they can recognize each other. And a female judge (who's name I cannot seem to find online) in a Dutch court, sentenced him to 100,000 euro fine for every time he donated if he was ever found donating again and required him to contact the donor banks and request his material be destroyed.

Donald Cline

(Also a Netflix documentary on this: Our Father)

A fertility (gynecology and obstetrics) doctor in the 1980s who welcomed women into his clinic before cryogenic freezing of sperm was a thing and it was freshly inseminated through a procedure. He let the women know that he was using the sperm of medical students and that there would be no more than three times sperm from the same student would be used. Some women, who weren't able to conceive with their husband for one reason or another, also came into the clinic wanting to use their own husband's sperm.

Years later a woman who grew up knowing that part of her DNA was from a sperm donor began wanting to connect with her potential siblings on 23&Me. She was shocked to discover at least 10 siblings she was related to. She got in touch with them.

It turns out that Dr. Cline proceeded to use his own sperm on the female patients, hiding somewhere in the clinic to produce it immediately before using it to inseminate unsuspecting women. This man covertly reproductively exploited several women and "fathered" 94 children. Whenever the children would try to meet with him, he would show up intentionally carrying a gun to intimidate them.

One of his biological daughters, who didn't realize Cline was her biological father until adulthood, even had him as her own gynecologist. He performed pap smears and breast exams on her. He knew that she was his biological offspring and she did not have the knowledge and therefore the option to decline being sexually examined by her biological father.

Dr. Cline was also tried in court by the victims; however, the judge was sympathetic to him.

____________________________________________________________

This form of sociopathy not only majorly creates significant consequences to the gene pool for our human species as these half siblings are at higher risk of incest, but the psychological harm done to the mothers and the children are horrific. Some of these (now adult) children have described an entire undoing of their self-identity, and many struggled in processing that the men who may have raised them was not their biological father. Some of these mothers are teaching their children to always ask whoever they date if they were ever conceived by a donor. These mothers now wrestle with conflicting emotions - the fact that they were betrayed, taken advantage of, and used to fulfill a man's god-complex, while also finally having a child or children that they love with all of their hearts who were a result of a violating situation.

These two men share two other things in common: they have both argued that they were "helping" these women. That these women came to them in need and that they were engaging in philanthropy and giving them what these women wanted. That they should be grateful.

And that they were interested in contributing to the white race. In addition to Meijer's comments in "spreading white seed", Jacoba, one of the child victims of fertility fraud/the reproductive rape of her mother by Donald Cline, described how he was using her mother as a pawn repeatedly to fulfill religious, male supremacist, and white supremacist ideals to spread the white race.

Now, look:

Presently there are little to no regulations or legal enforcement in preventing men from committing fertility fraud/this form of sexual violation and reproductive exploitation of women. There are little to no consequence for men substantially altering the genetic pool and using women as chattel and children as genetic products. In fact, Meijer was the first case in which a judge placed restrictions on male reproductive autonomy as a consequence for causing sexual, psychological, and evolutionary harm.