the trick is to keep breathing

Asked what would happen if he advocated publicly for limiting the power of commanders, the officer, a high-level Air Force lawyer (known as a Judge Advocate General, or JAG) with decades of experience with sexual assault and other criminal cases said, “It would kill my chances of ever having a good job again… I would be ostracized.” He concluded, “It would be the end of my career.”

Pathetic. The media we consume -- movies, news, television shows, social media, everything -- is, you know, rather unsurprisingly male-dominated. Shocking, right? Time Magazine has a writeup about the Women's Media Center's annual report on the state of women in media. Spoiler alert: it's all bad news.

Food for thought for those of us who write poetry and also happen to be women. From the excellent piece:

Oh. Really? This asshole's incredible, hateful misogyny is just so fucking FANTASTIC. Ugh. Jesus Christ. Fuck him.

Click the green title bar above to see an amazing interactive map of women's rights around the world.

Which countries have laws preventing violence? Which legislate for gender equality? And which countries allow abortion? Using World Bank and UN data we offer a snapshot of women's rights across the globe. Select a region and hover over a country to see how it has legislated for violence, harassment, abortion, property and employment rights, discrimination and equality. Click on a country to tweet a message on the figures. Country data can be viewed in relation to its population size and those of its neighbouring states.

The people over at Force: Upsetting Rape Culture will host a historic display of the Monument Quilt on February 14 from 1 to 6 p.m. on the West Lawn of the Capital Building as part of One Billion Rising.

From Force's website:

The Monument Quilt is a crowd-sourced collection of thousands of stories from survivors of rape and abuse. By stitching our stories together, we are creating and demanding public space to heal. The Monument Quilt is a platform to not only tell our stories, but work together to forever change how Americans respond to rape. We are creating a new culture where survivors are publicly supported rather than publicly shamed.

The display on February 14 will be The Monument Quilt’s first appearance on our nation’s capitol.  Over the next two years, FORCE plans to collect thousands more quilt squares to eventually blanket over one mile of the National Mall.  The squares will be stitched together to spell “NOT ALONE”.

Laurie Penny has an awesome piece over at the New Statesman about short hair. Although I'm wearing my hair longer lately, the piece still really hits home. I've been called crazy for cutting my hair and for wearing it short; and now that my hair's longer, I am, unfortunately, finding myself on the receiving end of attention from male strangers.

Penny begins like this:

The “manosphere” really hates short-haired girls. On “game” forums and in personal dating manifestos, the wickedness of short-haired women pops up time and time again as theme and warning -- stay away from girls who’ve had their hair chopped off. They’re crazy, they’re deliberately destroying their femininity to “punish” men, but the last laugh will be on them, because the bitches will die alone. Yes, there are people who really believe this. In 2014.

She recounts how some dude wrote a dumb thing that's got hundreds of thousands of "likes" on facebook about women's hair, in which he claims, in part, that

long hair is “almost universally attractive to men, when they’re actually speaking honestly...Women instinctively know this, which is why every American girl who cuts, and keeps, her hair short often does it for ulterior reasons...Short hair is a political statement. And, invariably, a girl who has gone through with a short cut – and is pleased with the changes in her reception – is damaged in some significant way. Short hair is a near-guarantee that a girl will be more abrasive, more masculine, and more deranged.”

Penny summarizes the dude's bullshit by suggesting that

[t]he essential argument is: men like long hair, and what sane woman would ever want to do anything that decreases her capacity to please men?

I mean, really. Penny continues:

The idea that women might not place pleasing men at the centre of our politics, consciously or unconsciously, makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Sometimes it makes them angry. I am regularly asked whether I think that feminism ought to be “rebranded” in order to threaten men less, because anything a woman does, even attempt to chip away at a massive, slow-gringing superstructure of sexism, must appeal to men first, or it is meaningless. 

If making your life mean more than pleasing men is “deranged”, it's not just short-haired girls who are crazy.

I know lots of long-haired feminists. Also: I cheered when I read this:

Chopping your hair off is “a political statement.” Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made bigger ones in my life. But choosing to behave consciously as if the sexual attention and comfort of men is not my top priority has made more of a difference to how my life has turned out than I ever imagined.

Um, yeah. Maybe my long-hair phase will be a brief one.