redpurple4

I grew up in the 1960s on the West Side of Chicago. My mother died when I was six months old. She was only 16 and I never learned what it was that she died from - my grandmother, who drank more than most, couldn’t tell me later on.

It was my grandmother that took care of me. And she wasn’t a bad person - in fact she had a side to her that was so wonderful. She read to me, baked me stuff and cooked the best sweet potatoes. She just had this drinking problem. She would bring drinking partners home from the bar and after she got intoxicated and passed out these men would do things to me. It started when I was four or five years old and it became a regular occurrence. I’m certain my grandmother didn’t know anything about it. 

She worked as a domestic in the suburbs. It took her two hours to get to work and two hours to get home. So I was a latch-key kid - I wore a key around my neck and I would take myself to kindergarten and let myself back in at the end of the day. And the molesters knew about that, and they took advantage of it.

I would watch women with big glamorous hair and sparkly dresses standing on the street outside our house. I had no idea what they were up to; I just thought they were shiny. As a little girl, all I ever wanted was to be shiny. 

One day I asked my grandmother what the women were doing and she said, “Those women take their panties off and men give them money.” And I remember saying to myself, “I’ll probably do that” because men had already been taking my panties off. 

To look back now, I dealt with it all amazingly well. Alone in that house, I had imaginary friends to keep me company that I would sing and dance around with - an imaginary Elvis Presley, an imaginary Diana Ross and the Supremes. I think that helped me deal with things.

Even though I was a smart kid, I disconnected from school. Going into the 1970s, I became the kind of girl who didn’t know how to say “no” - if the little boys in the community told me that they liked me or treated me nice, they could basically have their way with me. By the time I was 14, I’d had two children with boys in the community, two baby girls. My grandmother started to say that I needed to bring in some money to pay for these kids, because there was no food in the house, we had nothing. 

So, one evening - it was actually Good Friday - I went along to the corner of Division Street and Clark Street and stood in front of the Mark Twain hotel. I was wearing a two-piece dress costing $3.99, cheap plastic shoes, and some orange lipstick which I thought might make me look older. 

I was 14 years old and I cried through everything. But I did it. I didn’t like it, but the five men who dated me that night showed me what to do. They knew I was young and it was almost as if they were excited by it. 

I made $400 but I didn’t get a cab home that night. I went home by train and I gave most of that money to my grandmother, who didn’t ask me where it came from. 

The following weekend I returned to Division and Clark, and it seemed like my grandmother was happy when I brought the money home. 

But the third time I went down there, a couple of guys pistol-whipped me and put me in the trunk of their car. They had approached me before because I was, as they called it, “unrepresented” on the street. All I knew was the light in the trunk of the car and then the faces of these two guys with their pistol. First they took me to a cornfield out in the middle of nowhere and raped me. Then they took me to a hotel room and locked me in the closet. That’s the kind of thing pimps will do to break a girl’s spirits. They kept me in there for a long time. I was begging them to let me out because I was hungry, but they would only allow me out of the closet if I agreed to work for them.

They pimped me for a while, six months or so. I wasn’t able to go home. I tried to get away but they caught me, and when they caught me they hurt me so bad. Later on, I was trafficked by other men. The physical abuse was horrible, but the real abuse was the mental abuse - the things they would say that would just stick and which you could never get from under. 

Pimps are very good at torture, they’re very good at manipulation. Some of them will do things like wake you in the middle of the night with a gun to your head. Others will pretend that they value you, and you feel like, “I’m Cinderella, and here comes my Prince Charming”. They seem so sweet and so charming and they tell you: “You just have to do this one thing for me and then you’ll get to the good part.” And you think, “My life has already been so hard, what’s a little bit more?” But you never ever do get to the good part. 

When people describe prostitution as being something that is glamorous, elegant, like in the story of Pretty Woman, well that doesn’t come close to it. A prostitute might sleep with five strangers a day. Across a year, that’s more than 1,800 men she’s having sexual intercourse or oral sex with. These are not relationships, no one’s bringing me any flowers here, trust me on that. They’re using my body like a toilet. 

And the johns - the clients - are violent. I’ve been shot five times, stabbed 13 times. I don’t know why those men attacked me, all I know is that society made it comfortable for them to do so. They brought their anger or whatever it was and they decided to wreak havoc on a prostitute, knowing I couldn’t go to the police and if I did I wouldn’t be taken seriously. I actually count myself very lucky. I knew some beautiful girls who were murdered out there on the streets.

I prostituted for 14 or 15 years before I did any drugs. But after a while, after you’ve turned as many tricks as you can, after you’ve been strangled, after someone’s put a knife to your throat or someone’s put a pillow over your head, you need something to put a bit of courage in your system. 

I was a prostitute for 25 years, and in all that time I never once saw a way out. But on 1 April 1997, when I was nearly 40 years old, a customer threw me out of his car. My dress got caught in the door and he dragged me six blocks along the ground, tearing all the skin off my face and the side of my body. 

I went to the County Hospital in Chicago and they immediately took me to the emergency room. Because of the condition I was in, they called in a police officer, who looked me over and said: “Oh I know her. She’s just a hooker. She probably beat some guy and took his money and got what she deserved.” And I could hear the nurse laughing along with him. They pushed me out into the waiting room as if I wasn’t worth anything, as if I didn’t deserve the services of the emergency room after all.

And it was at that moment, while I was waiting for the next shift to start and for someone to attend to my injuries, that I began to think about everything that had happened in my life. Up until that point I had always had some idea of what to do, where to go, how to pick myself up again. Suddenly it was like I had run out of bright ideas.

A doctor came and took care of me and she asked me to go and see social services in the hospital. What I knew about social services was they were anything but social. But they gave me a bus pass to go to a place called Genesis House, which was run by an awesome Englishwoman named Edwina Gateley, who became a great hero and mentor for me. She helped me turn my life around. It was a safe house, and I had everything that I needed there. I didn’t have to worry about paying for clothes, food, getting a job. They told me to take my time and stay as long as I needed - and I stayed almost two years. My face healed, my soul healed. I got Brenda back. 

Usually, when a woman gets out of prostitution, she doesn’t want to talk about it. What man will accept her as a wife? What person will hire her in their employment? And to begin with, after I left Genesis House, that was me too. I just wanted to get a job, pay my taxes and be like everybody else. But I started to do some volunteering with sex workers and to help a university researcher with her fieldwork. After a while I realised that nobody was helping these young ladies. Nobody was going back and saying, “That’s who I was, that’s where I was. This is who I am now. You can change too, you can heal too.” So in 2008, together with Stephanie Daniels-Wilson, we founded the Dreamcatcher Foundation. 

A dreamcatcher is a Native American object that you hang near a child’s cot. It is supposed to chase away children’s nightmares. That’s what we want to do - we want to chase away those bad dreams, those bad things that happen to young girls and women. The recent documentary film Dreamcatcher, directed by Kim Longinotto, showed the work that we do. We meet up with women who are still working on the street and we tell them, “There is a way out, we’re ready to help you when you’re ready to be helped.” We try to get through that brainwashing that says, “You’re born to do this, there’s nothing else for you.“ 

I also run after-school clubs with young girls who are exactly like I was in the 1970s. I can tell as soon as I meet a girl if she is in danger, but there is no fixed pattern. You might have one girl who’s quiet and introverted and doesn’t make eye contact. Then there might be another who’s loud and obnoxious and always getting in trouble. They’re both suffering abuse at home but they’re dealing with it in different ways - the only thing they have in common is that they are not going to talk about it. But in time they understand that I have been through what they’re going through, and then they talk to me about it.

People say different things about prostitution. Some people think that it would actually help sex workers more if it were decriminalized. I think it’s true to say that every woman has her own story. It may be OK for this girl, who is paying her way through law school, but not for this girl, who was molested as a child, who never knew she had another choice, who was just trying to get money to eat. 

But let me say this too. However the situation starts off for a girl, that’s not how the situation will end up. It might look OK now, the girl in law school might say she only has high-end clients that come to her through an agency, that she doesn’t work on the streets but arranges to meet people in hotel rooms, but the first time that someone hurts her, that’s when she really sees her situation for what it is. You always get that crazy guy slipping through and he has three or four guys behind him, and they force their way into your room and gang rape you, and take your phone and all your money. And suddenly you have no means to make a living and you’re beaten up too. That is the reality of prostitution.

Three years ago, I became the first woman in the state of Illinois to have her convictions for prostitution wiped from her record. It was after a new law was brought in, following lobbying from the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, a group that seeks to shift the criminal burden away from the victims of sexual trafficking. Women who have been tortured, manipulated and brainwashed should be treated as survivors, not criminals.

So I am here to tell you - there is life after so much damage, there is life after so much trauma. There is life after people have told you that you are nothing, that you are worthless and that you will never amount to anything. There is life - and I’m not just talking about a little bit of life. There is a lot of life.

You can find the Dreamcatcher Foundation’s website here. I’ve had her organization on my pinned post of charities to support for forever.

Source: Documentary lauds Hollywood stuntwomen, who do everything men do but in high heels (Sept. 22, 2020)

One of the most sought-after stuntwomen in Hollywood, Ms. [Zoe] Bell crashes through glass, slams into book cases and leaps from tall buildings. She has done stunts on more than 20 films and television series, including "Alias," "Kill Bill" and "Xena: Warrior Princess." Asked if she could accomplish a 22-story spinning fall from a skyscraper for 2004's "Catwoman," Ms. Bell thought for a moment and said, "Yes, I can." To get the chilling fall just right, she did it four times. "It's not until after you've been hit by a car and landed all right that the fear kicks in," she said. Stuntwomen often face greater dangers than their male cohorts. While stuntmen wear pads under their clothing, stuntwomen in action films are often minimally clothed; there is no place to hide padding or protective gear in their bikinis or ball gowns. Doubling for Sharon Stone, Ms. Bell had to do the high fall in "Catwoman" in high heels. "Because that's how women fight and die—in heels," she said, with a slight roll of her eyes.

I have seen a post circulating for a while that lists 10 short stories everyone should read and, while these are great works, most of them are older and written by white men. I wanted to make a modern list that features fresh, fantastic and under represented voices. Enjoy!

1. A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri — A couple in a failing marriage share secrets during a blackout. 

2. Stone Animals by Kelly Link — A family moves into a haunted house.

3. Reeling for the Empire by Karen Russell — Women are sold by their families to a silk factory, where they are slowly transformed into human silkworms. 

4. Call My Name by Aimee Bender — A woman wearing a ball gown secretly auditions men on the subway. 

5. The Man on the Stairs by Miranda July — A woman wakes up to a noise on the stairs. 

6. Brownies by ZZ Packer — Rival Girl Scout troops are separated by race. 

7. City of My Dreams by Zsuzi Gartner — A woman works at a shop selling food-inspired soap and tries not to think about her past. 

8. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor — A family drives from Georgia to Florida, even though a serial killer is on the loose. 

9. Hitting Budapest by NoViolet Bulawayo — A group of children, led by a girl named Darling, travel to a rich neighborhood to steal guavas. 

I’d like to add:

11. Good Country People by Flannery O’Connor

12. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (this one is my favorite short story of all time)

13. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

14. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates

15. Désirée’s Baby by Kate Chopin

16. The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin

17. Impressions of an Indian Childhood by Zitkala-Ša

18. “My Dear You,” Rachel Khong — love, loss, & absurdity in the afterlife

19. “The Husband Stitch,” Carmen Maria Machado — a feminist retelling of the folklore story “The Green Ribbon”

20. “Inventory,” Carmen Maria Machado — one woman’s retrospective list of her life’s sexual encounters

21. “Boys Go to Jupiter,” Danielle Evans — what happens after a white college student poses for a photo in a Confederate flag bikini

23. “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” and “Mountain Ways” by Ursula K. Le Guin — The first is a study of philosophical questions similar to the trolley problem, told in very loose form. The second is a science-fantasy story about two women navigating love and sexuality in their society’s polyamorous marriage rituals. But honestly you should read all of Le Guin’s short stories and novels, she’s amazing.

24. “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler — One of my all-time FAVORITE short stories, about a future where humans live alongside large insect-like aliens, and serve as hosts for their eggs and larval young. It’s gruesome, gory, unsettling, and honestly pretty horrific but it’s really wonderful–if you can handle horror in your stories I highly recommended it. Butler’s novels are also wonderful, please check them out if you can (not all of them are this unsettling)

25. “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi” by Pat Cadigan — A trans allegory in which future humans go through surgery to become invertebrate sea creatures (cephalopods and arthropods mostly) in order to better work in space. Wonderfully weird in so many ways.

What do you think? Any experience with these books, did you enjoy them? What books am I missing? I know I'm missing works by Dworkin but I'm saving up for those.

07/28/17

JESSICA CHOU Has A YouTube Channel Teaching Women About Basic Vehicle Maintenance

This is quite an interesting YouTube channel concept, and it shows that … Asian chicks kick ass! JESSICA CHOU is a young Asian American woman who has a YouTube channel which basically teaches other girls and women about how to fix their car.

Council of Europe Strasbourg 11 June 2026

Women are being pushed from online spaces, harming democracy

The Council of Europe has launched a new recommendation aimed at strengthening accountability for technology-facilitated violence against women and girls, a rapidly growing form of abuse that increasingly threatens women's safety, dignity and participation in public life.

Technology-facilitated violence includes cyberstalking, online harassment, the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, privacy violations, misogynistic hate campaigns, threats and image manipulation. Such abuse often accompanies other forms of violence, including domestic violence, allowing perpetrators to extend surveillance, coercion and control through digital tools.

Europe comes together against online violence against women and girls

Many representatives of the Council of Europe’s 46 member countries attended the 10 June launch, which was held online and at the Council of Europe’s headquarters in Strasbourg.  Featured speakers at the event praised the recommendation, adopted by the Committee of Ministers in March, for providing guidance to European countries on preventing and combating violence committed, assisted, aggravated or amplified through digital technologies. It also sets out measures to ensure that perpetrators, facilitators and, where appropriate, technology companies are held accountable.

Catherine Van De Heyning, Professor of European fundamental rights law at the University of Antwerp and Deputy Public Prosecutor in Antwerp's cybercrime division, described the recommendation as “a major step forward in ensuring that justice systems are equipped to respond effectively to technology-facilitated violence against women and girls.”

She highlighted emerging forms of abuse driven not only by misogyny or harassment, but also by financial gain, citing a recent case in which Belgian authorities arrested a Dutch national accused of operating Telegram groups that distributed and sold intimate images and personal information of women without their consent.

Online violence harming women in public life

The recommendation warns that technology-facilitated violence can lead to anxiety, depression, reputational harm, economic loss and withdrawal from online spaces. It also notes that women in public life are particularly affected, including journalists, politicians, human-rights defenders and women’s rights activists, who are frequently targeted by coordinated online attacks intended to intimidate or silence them.

To address these challenges, the recommendation calls for stronger laws and policies, effective investigations and access to justice, improved support services for victims, enhanced international cooperation and greater responsibility for technology companies and online platforms. It also promotes prevention through education, digital literacy and awareness-raising.

Also participating in the launch, María Rún Bjarnadóttir, head of legal at the Office of the national commissioner of the Icelandic police and a member of the Council of Europe’s GREVIO monitoring body (which deals with violence against women) stressed the need to strengthen law-enforcement capacity and to keep pace with rapidly evolving technologies such as digital forensic expertise.

The recommendation forms part of the Council of Europe's broader efforts to ensure that women and girls can participate fully, equally and safely in the digital environment and that technological innovation advances human rights rather than undermining them.

By Diego Bonomo, Jadzia Pierce, Gustavo Akkerman & Anna Sophia Oberschelp de Meneses on June 11, 2026

Posted in International, Uncategorized

On 20 May 2026, Brazil adopted Presidential Decree No. 12,976, establishing a comprehensive framework to address violence against women online. Adopted alongside a parallel decree (No. 12,975) reforming intermediary liability, it reflects a more assertive approach to regulating online harms, including those driven or amplified by AI. Together, these measures will require companies to reassess internal processes to ensure rapid content removal and more proactive monitoring, including for AI‑enabled services.

While framed as a gender‑based violence measure, the Decree reflects a broader shift in regulatory expectations from reactive moderation to proactive platform duties and systemic accountability. It also forms part of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration’s broader efforts, ongoing since 2023, to regulate social media in the absence of comprehensive legislation. This approach has already triggered constitutional and policy debate, including regarding the use of presidential decrees to impose substantive obligations and potential implications for freedom of expression.

A broad, technology‑aware definition of digital violence

A key feature of the Decree is its expansive definition of “violence against women in the digital environment.” It goes beyond traditional offences such as harassment or threats to include conduct causing physical, psychological, political or economic harm, including where amplified by digital technologies.

The Decree expressly covers AI‑generated or manipulated content, such as synthetic intimate images and AI‑enabled harassment. This effectively integrates AI‑related harms into mainstream online safety rules rather than treating them separately. The framework is grounded in principles such as victim protection, privacy, and the prohibition of re‑victimisation.

From notice-and-action to structured platform duties

The Decree introduces a more structured regime for platforms hosting user‑generated content. In particular, platforms must:

provide accessible reporting channels;

assess and respond to notifications promptly;

communicate decisions and reasoning to both notifier and user; and

direct users to appropriate support services.

Platforms may retain content where there is reasonable doubt as to its illegality, provided the decision is justified and communicated, preserving proportionality and procedural fairness.

These obligations should be read in light of a 2025 Brazilian Supreme Court decision that significantly limited the traditional “safe harbor” under Article 19 of the Marco Civil da Internet. Under that regime, platforms were generally only liable for third‑party content if they failed to comply with a court‑ordered takedown. The Court’s decision departs from this approach, indicating that platforms may be required to remove unlawful content directly, including upon user notice, without prior judicial intervention, and introducing a broader “duty of care” (dever de cuidado). While not expressly codified, the Decree clearly reflects and operationalizes this shift by embedding more structured notice-handling accountability requirements.

Full PDFs of some books I consider radical feminist must reads

drink up - a comic about female rage.

(text analysis and things you may have missed under the cut)

Classic

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

Sexual Politics by Kate Millett

On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 by Adrienne Rich

The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf

Fiction

The Power by Naomi Alderman

Salt Slow by Julia Armfield

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin

The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

The Gate to Woman’s Country by Sheri S. Tepper

History

Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici

The Living Goddesses by Marija Gimbutas

The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner

Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World by Rosalind Miles

Women of Ideas: And What Men Have Done to Them by Dale Spender

Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science-and the World by Rachel Swaby

Intersectional

Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis

Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks

It’s Not About the Burqa by Mariam Khan (editor)

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color by Cherríe Moraga (editor) and Gloria Anzaldúa (editor)

Lesbian

Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective by Sheila Jeffreys

The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture by Bonnie J. Morris

Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism by Suzanne Pharr

Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence by Adrienne Rich

Liberal vs. radical

Female Erasure: What You Need to Know about Gender Politics’ War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights by Ruth Barrett (editor)

End of Equality by Beatrix Campbell

Feminisms: A Global History by Lucy Delap

Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 by Alice Echols

Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism by Sheila Jeffreys

Freedom Fallacy: The Limits of Liberal Feminism by Miranda Kiraly (editor) and Meagan Tyler (editor)

The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism by Dorchen Leidholdt (editor) and Janice G. Raymond (editor)

The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male by Janice G. Raymond

We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement by Andi Zeisler

Pornography, prostitution, surrogacy & rape

Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape by Susan Brownmiller

Slavery Inc.: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking by Lydia Cacho

Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality by Gail Dines

Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self by Kajsa Ekis Ekman

The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade by Sheila Jeffreys

Only Words by Catharine A. Mackinnon

Know My Name by Chanel Miller

Not a Choice, Not a Job: Exposing the Myths about Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade by Janice G. Raymond

Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle Over Women’s Freedom by Janice G. Raymond

Psychology & trauma

Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine

Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror by Judith Lewis Herman

Toward a New Psychology of Women by Jean Baker Miller

Theory

Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism by Mary Daly

Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin by Andrea Dworkin, Johanna Fateman (editor) and Amy Scholder (editor

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone

Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks

Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis by Robin Ruth Linden (editor), Darlene R. Pagano (editor), Diana E. H. Russell (editor) and Susan Leigh Star (editor)

Toward a Feminist Theory of the State by Catharine A. Mackinnon

The Sexual Contract by Carole Pateman

Other

Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now by Jenny Brown

Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression by Christine Delphy

Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery

Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West by Sheila Jeffreys

Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues by Catharine A. Mackinnon

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez

A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection by Janice G. Raymond

How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ

Man Made Language by Dale Spender

What do you think? Any experience with these books, did you enjoy them? What books am I missing? I know I'm missing works by Dworkin but I'm saving up for those.

In 2024, Afghanistan was the only country in the world where higher and secondary education was officially banned for women, according to UNESCO. Now, after two years, girls cannot even have a basic primary education.

The UN also reports insanely high maternal mortality rates in Afghanistan during childbirth, while the government is banning female doctors, the only ones they believe can help other women, from studying. They leave women to die under the rubble simply because they don't want to touch them.

They would rather watch their mothers, daughters and wives die in agony than help them.

For the most of the world, Afghanistan is a place in the middle of nowhere. They don't have nuclear weapons. They don't have a gigantic army. They don't have hundreds of billionaire entrepreneurs who anchor the global economy. On the surface, liberating the Afghan people is the easiest thing in terms of political consequences.

But no one does. The UN tweets sad emojis, European countries think refugees should collect a ton of paperwork, because this is the perfect time for democracy, right? Well, they won't die from it, right? (/sarc, because THEY LITERALLY ARE AND WILL IF THAT WONT STOP)

And it's not really about the deeper political context, if you decide to ask where the Taliban got their guns from and other things. The point is that globally... no one cares. Nothing interesting. Perhaps these women don't need an education. Probably they don't need a voice. Is that even inmportant? Do they even mind walking around completely wrapped up, as if their appearance is dirty and depraved "just by nature"?

How do you even know that they want to live? That they don't want to die? That they don't want to die seeing their nine-year-old daughters being raped?

These are their traditions. It is normal for them. No need to interfere. No need to speak about that. No need to ask your leaders why they do nothing with that and show no reaction. To ask them isn't that what they secretly wish for your own country. To ask your male friends, fathers and brothers what do they think about that. To ask why they do NOT care about that.

I don't belive world leaders and I don't belive male donimation world, what is the same thing unfortunatly. And never will.