Less than two years after we married, my copilot seat is empty. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. 

After all, we agreed. We promised to be partners in adventure and launched ourselves into the unknown. The space metaphor is worn, with good reason. Most of space is vast nothingness, an overwhelming and deadly darkness. Yet within it there’s also possibility, hope, and excitement that we might find a planet, a galaxy, maybe even wormholes and all those disruptions to the space-time continuum we’ve read about.

Both sci-fi nerds, we were fascinated by this tension and the stories that unfold inside it. Side by side, we’d explore our own galaxies: me on the Xbox, him on his computer. What’s going on in your space? He’d ask. I’m trying to decide which alien to make out with next. You? He’d laugh. Forming alliances with new corporations, being a captain, you know.

Dr. Horrible: And sometime there’s a third, even deeper level. And that one is the same as teh top, surface one.

Penny: Huh?

Margaret Cho: Trolls Who Call Me ‘Fat And Ugly’ Are Admitting Defeat

Margaret Cho has a simple philosophy for dealing with degrading comments about herself: If you’re debating a woman and you stoop to calling her “fat” or “ugly,” you’ve already lost the argument.

I am a gamer. I followed the call of Cthulhu and ran in the shadows with hackers and shamans. I traversed the ancient lands of Greyhawk, Faerun, and Eberron with companions new and old. I swung from an airship and buckled swash over London for the Kerberos Club. I threw dice and flipped cards and ground men into dust playing table-top wargames.

I don’t do that anymore.

Since July of 2015 fans of the game Malifaux have been attempting to overwhelm me with death and rape threats for no other reason than I am a woman who has opinions on the game. Wyrd Miniatures is silent on this matter and hangs up whenever anyone attempts to discuss the harassment. Given that a large number of threats identify the senders by name as Wyrd staff members, I do not find this surprising.

But that’s not what this article is about.

Nichelle Nichols “Lt. Uhura” flies aboard SOFIA

Nichelle Nichols recently flew on board NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, the world’s largest airborne observatory. Ms. Nichols has been collaborating with NASA for years, actively recruiting into the astronaut corps and into STEM careers. In the 1980s, she flew on SOFIA’s predecessor, the Kuiper Airborne Observatory.

During her flight, Ms. Nichols recorded this short message highlighting the important research NASA is doing to further humankind’s exploration of the solar system and beyond. Learn more by visiting: www.nasa.gov/solarsystem/

——-

“Hi, I”m Nichelle Nichols, I played Lieutenant Uhura - Chief Communications Officer aboard the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek The Original Series. Today I’m aboard SOFIA, a NASA aircraft flying into a stratosphere with an infrared telescope to observe light coming from interstellar objects. SOFIA helps astronomers learn more about the birth of stars, formations of planetary systems, black holes and more.. 

SOFIA  reminds of the starship Enterprise - it goes ‘Where no man or woman has ever gone before’

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POWER & MAGIC: A Queer Witch Comics Anthology…

…About Women of Color, By Women of Color!

Accepting submissions between February 15th - March 15th 2016.

Who Are You? And Why Queer Witches?

I’m Joamette Gil, a contributing cartoonist for EverydayFeminism.com as well as an all-around comics maker and social justice pusher. My heart belongs to speculative fiction and watching badass women of color get ahead. 

In addition to being the title for the anthology, “POWER & MAGIC” is also the imprint name I’ve been sitting on for years for my non-autobio/educational comics work. I want POWER & MAGIC PRESS’s premiere anthology to encapsulate its mission: putting forth stories by myself and others that capture the relationships between us, the powers that be, and the magic of “we.” 

Witches are icons of female power. They represent rebellion, transcendence, healing, feminine monstrosity, so-called “deviance,” and interconnectedness (with the earth, with their bodies, with each other).

And I’m a queer witch, of course. 

Why Only Women of Color?

Because we exist and we matter! 

Because our spirits soared for the Japanese magical girls on television. Because an avatar from the Southern Water Tribe captured our hearts. Because a black female protagonist is not “unbelievable” in a world where sorcery reigns and mythical beasts run amok. 

Because queer women of color are on the front lines of fighting for change and justice in real life. Because the fierceness it takes to survive as both a queer person, a person of color, and a woman is worthy of legend. Because comics need women like us, and women like us need to get paid.

And because someone is going to ask this as well: yes, this anthology is open to all women of color, not just cisgender or single-gender women. Women are women! 

The Nitty Gritty

Submission Period: Submissions will open at 12:00 am Pacific Standard Time on February 15th, 2016, and close at 11:59 pm on March 15th, 2016. 

Acceptance and rejection letters will go out on March 31st, 2016.

Specs: All comics will be 6″ x 9″ (trim size) and in black & white (grayscale and tones okay). Stories will range between 3 - 13 pages long. More details will be provided to those accepted!   

Instructions: Send an email to [email protected] with the subject line “Power & Magic Submission” including: 

The name, pronouns, and role of everyone on your team. Solo submissions are fine, too!

A working title and page count for your comic (doesn’t have to be exact).

A synopsis of your story, including a beginning, middle, and end. Spoil everything relevant - I need to know! - but try to keep it under 500 words. Well under.

A list of any relevant publishing credits (whether you’re writing the comic, drawing it, lettering it, or doing everything yourself) plus links. Try to choose examples that best reflect the style you’re going for with the anthology comic. Self-published work/webcomics count! You can simply include a link to your art portfolio if you have no pre-existing credits, but please note that folks with examples of sequential storytelling will receive preference. 

Tell me about yourself, your cultural and artistic background, and why you want to be in POWER & MAGIC. Short and sweet is best!

Rights: By accepting payment, you are ceding exclusive first worldwide rights to your story for a full calendar year from the date of publication, and non-exclusive worldwide reprint and digital rights in perpetuity. That means you are granting me permission to print, reprint, and sell the anthology with your work included in it (in both physical and digital format) indefinitely. It also means you are promising not to print or post your POWER & MAGIC submission until after the print copies of the anthology have been on sale for one calendar year. The *second* they have been, you can do literally anything you want with the comic pages you made - post them all on your Tumblr, reprint it as its own mini, sell that mini, submit it to other anthologies that except pre-existing work, etc - because they are YOUR sole intellectual property!

Compensation: $100 per page, per team, pending Kickstarter success. 

If the Kickstarter does not succeed, for whatever reason, you are free to self-publish your submissions as you see fit, and I will have zero rights to publish your work! If everything goes well, compensation will also include a minimum of 10 complementary copies of the anthology for each creative team as well as the right to purchase more copies at 50% off the cover price for as long as I have copies in stock. If everything goes very well (overfunding), excess funds will be used to raise creator pay!

What Should I NOT Submit?

No fan comics. No autobio. No prose. No one-off illustrations. No unexamined bigotry. No genitals (sex and sexuality are fine so long as they service the plot). No excessive gore. No torture porn. No steampunk.

Wait! I have another question!

‘I’m No Longer Afraid’: 35 Women Tell Their Stories About Being Assaulted by Bill Cosby, and the Culture That Wouldn’t Listen

By Noreen Malone and Portfolio By Amanda Demme

More has changed in the past few years for women who allege rape than in all the decades since the women’s movement began. Consider the evidence of October 2014, when an audience member at a Hannibal Buress show in Philadelphia uploaded a clip of the comedian talking about Bill Cosby: “He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up, black people … I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.’ Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches … I guess I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch Cosby Showreruns. Dude’s image, for the most part, it’s fucking public Teflon image. I’ve done this bit onstage and people think I’m making it up … That shit is upsetting.” The bit went viral swiftly, with irreversible, calamitous consequences for Cosby’s reputation.

Perhaps the most shocking thing wasn’t that Buress had called Cosby a rapist; it was that the world had actually heard him. A decade earlier, 14 women had accused Cosby of rape. In 2005, a former basketball star named Andrea Constand, who met Cosby when she was working in the athletic department at Temple University, where he served on the board of trustees, alleged to authorities that he had drugged her to a state of semi-consciousness and then groped and digitally penetrated her. After her allegations were made public, a California lawyer named Tamara Green appeared on the Today show and said that, 30 years earlier, Cosby had drugged and assaulted her as well. Eventually, 12 Jane Does signed up to tell their own stories of being assaulted by Cosby in support of Constand’s case. Several of them eventually made their names public. But they were met, mostly, with skepticism, threats, and attacks on their character.

In Cosby’s deposition for the Constand case, revealed to the public just last week, the comedian admitted pursuing sex with young women with the aid of Quaaludes, which can render a person functionally immobile. “I used them,” he said, “the same as a person would say, ‘Have a drink.’ ” He asked a modeling agent to connect him with young women who were new in town and “financially not doing well.” In the deposition, Cosby seemed confident that his behavior did not constitute rape; he apparently saw little difference between buying someone dinner in pursuit of sex and drugging them to reach the same goal. As for consent, he said, “I think that I’m a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things.” If these women agreed to meet up, his deposition suggested, he felt that he had a right to them. And part of what took the accusations against Cosby so long to surface is that this belief extended to many of the women themselves (as well as the staff and lawyers and friends and others who helped keep the incidents secret).

Months after his depositions, Cosby settled the case with Constand. The accusations quickly faded from the public’s memory, if they registered at all. No one wanted to believe the TV dad in a cardigan was capable of such things, and so they didn’t. The National Enquirer had planned to run a big story detailing one of the women’s accounts, but the magazine pulled it when Cosby agreed to give them a two-page exclusive telling his side (essentially that these were instances that had been “misinterpreted”).People ran a story alleging that several of the women had taken money in exchange for their silence, implying that this was nothing more than an elaborate shakedown. Cosby’s career rolled on: In 2014 alone, there was a stand-up special, plans for a new family comedy on NBC, and a high-profile biography by Mark Whitaker that glossed over the accusations.

The group of women Cosby allegedly assaulted functions almost as a longitudinal study — both for how an individual woman, on her own, deals with such trauma over the decades and for how the culture at large has grappled with rape over the same time period. In the ’60s, when the first alleged assault by Cosby occurred, rape was considered to be something violent committed by a stranger; acquaintance rape didn’t register as such, even for the women experiencing it. A few of Cosby’s accusers claim that he molested or raped them multiple times; one remained in his orbit, in and out of a drugged state, for years. In the ’70s and ’80s, campus movements like Take Back the Night and “No Means No” helped raise awareness of the reality that 80 to 90 percent of victims know their attacker. Still, the culture of silence and shame lingered, especially when the men accused had any kind of status. The first assumption was that women who accused famous men were after money or attention. As Cosby allegedly told some of his victims: No one would believe you. So why speak up?

But among younger women, and particularly online, there is a strong sense now that speaking up is the only thing to do, that a woman claiming her own victimhood is more powerful than any other weapon in the fight against rape. Emma Sulkowicz, carrying her mattress around Columbia in a performance-art protest of her alleged rape, is an extreme practitioner of this idea. This is a generation that’s been radicalized, in just the past few years, by horrific examples of rape and reactions to rape — like the 2012 Steubenville incident, in which high-school football players brutally violated a passed-out teenage girl at a party and photographed and braggingly circulated the evidence. That same year, when a 14-year-old Missouri cheerleader accused a popular older boy at her school of sexual assault, her classmates shamed her on social media and the family’s house was burned down. The whole world watched online. How could this kind of thing still be happening? These cases felt unignorable, unforgettable, Old Testament biblical. Would anyone have believed the girls, or cared, had the evidence not been digitizable? And: How could you be a young woman and not care deeply about trying to fix this?

This generation will probably be further galvanized by the allegations that a national cultural icon may have been allowed to drug and rape women for decades, with no repercussions. But these younger women have given something to Cosby’s accusers as well: a model for how to speak up, and a megaphone in the form of social media.

Facebook and Twitter, the forums that helped circulate the Buress clip, were full of rage at Cosby’s perceived cruelty. Barbara Bowman, who’d come forward during the Constand case, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about her frustration that no one had believed her for all those years. Three days after Bowman’s op-ed, another woman, Joan Tarshis, came forward to say Cosby had drugged and raped her in 1969. By the end of November, 16 more women had come forward. Cosby resigned from Temple’s board of trustees and sought monetary damages from one of his accusers; he also told “Page Six” that he wanted “the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism [and] go in with a neutral mind.” (Cosby, through representatives, has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and hasn’t been charged with any crimes. Emails to four of his lawyers and press reps went unanswered, although his team has begun a media tour to deny that his admission of offering Quaaludes to women was tantamount to admitting he’d raped anyone.) By February, there were another 12 accusers. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joked about it at the Golden Globes: “Sleeping Beauty just thought she was getting coffee with Bill Cosby.” Attorney Gloria Allred got involved, representing more than a dozen of the women. Even President Obama said it was clear to him: “If you give a woman — or a man, for that matter — without his or her knowledge a drug, and then have sex with that person without consent, that’s rape.”

There are now 46 women who have come forward publicly to accuse Cosby of rape or sexual assault; the 35 women here are the accusers who were willing to be photographed and interviewed by New York. The group, at present, ranges in age from early 20s to 80 and includes supermodels Beverly Johnson and Janice Dickinson alongside waitresses and Playboy bunnies and journalists and a host of women who formerly worked in show business. Many of the women say they know of others still out there who’ve chosen to remain silent.

This project began six months ago, when we started contacting the then-30 women who had publicly claimed Cosby assaulted them, and it snowballed in the same way that the initial accusations did: First two women signed on, then others heard about it and joined in, and so on. Just a few days before the story was published, we photographed the final two women, bringing our total to 35. “I’m no longer afraid,” said Chelan Lasha, who came forward late last year to say that Cosby had drugged her when she was 17. “I feel more powerful than him.”

Accompanying this photo essay is a compilation of the interviews with these women, a record of trauma and survival — the memories that remain of the decades-old incidents. All 35 were interviewed separately, and yet their stories have remarkable similarities, in everything from their descriptions of the incidents to the way they felt in the aftermath. Each story is awful in its own right. But the horror is multiplied by the sheer volume of seeing them together, reading them together, considering their shared experience. The women have found solace in their number — discovering that they hadn’t been alone, that there were others out there who believed them implicitly, with whom they didn’t need to be afraid of sharing the darkest details of their lives. They are scattered all over the country — ten different states are represented — and most of them had no contact with their fellow accusers until recently. But since reading about each other’s stories in the news, or finding one another on social media, or meeting in person at the photo shoots arranged by New York, many of the women have forged a bond. It is, as Tarshis calls it, “a sorrowful sisterhood.” ■

Their stories, in their own words:

Last night, my friend Arabelle tweeted this, and I woke up this morning to a share of information on yet another friend’s Facebook wall regarding a guy (who I didn’t know) who, by his own admission, had sexually assaulted at least one person. This guy was, by all reports, someone who consistently used progressive, feminist, “Tumblr leftist” rhetoric (I saw it in his own words from screenshots), and people around him were expressing how scary it is that someone who talked the talk would be so far from walking the walk.

It is scary, but it isn’t anything new. And it’s why I recoil from men who are extremely keen to tell me exactly how Feminist they are. Besides the fact that I am personally put off by lifestyle activism and Feminism-As-Identity when it comes to any person (I don’t care about the talk much at all, let’s see that walk though), in my experience, the men who yell the loudest about how much they care about my liberation are more likely in my experience to be abusive on a personal level. The ability of abusive, manipulative people to pick up and utilize the rhetoric of progressive movements in order to gain the trust of those they see as potential victims is frightening and real and it is incredibly common. It’s even easier to pick up that rhetoric now that social networking has made a lot of structural, theoretical ideas accessible that were previously harder to get one’s arms around. There has been great benefit from this accessibility, but there is also greater potential for people who don’t have the best intentions to get in there and use this rhetoric to inflate their egos at best and assault, abuse and bully others at worst. This is how we get, say, a Hugo Schwyzer. I have written about this process before.

It’s upsetting, and it’s something I didn’t want to believe was true for a long time, because no matter how many people hurt me or abused me or bullied me I always wanted to believe the best about them. (This has changed. Everyone has a line, I guess.) Over my lifetime of working for my own survival and for the voices of other sexual assault survivors I’ve encountered more abusers than I can name, including more than one man who wanted me to use my position as someone people listen to about these topics to personally attack another man who had not actually been abusive at all for personal gain. (The fact that I fell for this once when I trusted people more is one of my life’s biggest regrets and something I have to take responsibility for. It is not something that will ever, ever happen again.)

So: my allies are the people who have my back. They might not always say the right thing and we might disagree about language and tactics sometimes. But they will always listen to me thoughtfully, and vice versa, and when push comes to shove, they have my back, and I have theirs. This whole thing is ultimately all about caring about the innate humanity of others, seeing them and valuing them and respecting them for who they are in all their complicated, imperfect, structurally dynamic facets. I have friends who think discussion around the use of slurs is a little silly who have come to my aid when a man they were friends with was handsy with me at shows, or a man started harassing me in public.

Those are the people I trust. Trust is something that must be earned. It’s not something that comes with a cute Tumblr privilege checklist. It’s not something that comes with activist credentials. It’s not something that comes with hardcore lyrics about the Right Topics. No matter how much you show you care about things, nobody owes you access to their life. It doesn’t mean you can ignore boundaries; it doesn’t mean you are owed trust.

As she often does, Laverne Cox recently sparked an important discussion about the trans experience. In arecent Tumblr post, Cox eloquently made her feelings about Caitlyn Jenner known — specifically, how herVanity Fair cover hits on a broader, crucial discussion of the public perception and acceptance of trans women.

Cox noted that the public often praises her beauty, and is now praising Jenner’s beauty, based on their ability to embody “cisnormative beauty standards,” and in doing so ignores that there “are many trans folks, because of genetics and/or lack of material access, who will never be able to embody these standards,” not to mention that “many trans folks don’t want to embody” those standards.

This dialogue inspired one Tumblr user to elevate the conversation to the next level.

“I’ve felt frustrated and useless and overwhelmed by opinions on transgender women and how we’re ‘supposed’ to look if we want to be taken seriously,” Tumblr user Crystal wrote on Wednesday. “But not all of us adhere to those standards. Not all of us want to. Not all of us can. Some of us do, but only out of fear. Some of us do but we aren’t sure why. And whether we fit those standards or not, we’re beautiful, and we all deserve to feel beautiful, and be acknowledged by the world.”

Trans women should be celebrated, Crystal noted, no matter how they look, and especially regardless if they fit a largely stereotypical standard of beauty, as many have noted Jenner does. This inspired Crystal to create a template for trans women all over the world to create their own Vanity Fair covers, using the hashtag #MyVanityFairCover and “show the world the myriad faces of the trans community.”

Plenty of other trans Tumblr users took on the challenge.

“Most trans women don’t have millions of dollars and instant access to doctors, hormones and surgeries like Caitlyn Jenner has,” Tumblr user Nadia wrote. “And not all of us can or even want to adhere to western cisnormative beauty standards. This doesn’t make us any less beautiful, or any less valid as women.”

“I’m not wearing any makeup,” another user, Noelle, wrote. “I haven’t shaved in two days or showered since yesterday … I certainly don’t feel like I deserve a Vanity Fair cover, but I’m putting this up here anyway because that’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

Jenn hopes her cover contributes to a “serious call for a focus on more varied stories of transition,” shenoted in her post.

Others offered their own covers with little commentary, letting the images speak for themselves.

As Cox herself noted, Jenner is beautiful and the visibility she brings to the trans community is valuable. But she’s hardly representative of the entire community. Thanks to intrepid individuals harnessing the power of social media, though, the public has the opportunity to understand just how diverse — and diversely beautiful — the trans community really is.

My reaction to this Tumblr trend promoting trans visibility and positivity.

oh

my

god

omg