Yay Feminism!

"A white-bearded man looks straight into the camera, in the video circulating for the past few weeks on social media. “I killed my wife,” he says calmly in Urdu. “We have a give-and-take arrangement and when she refused to give, I said I would take.”

Hours earlier, the 64-year-old had walked into a police station in Karachi’s Orangi neighbourhood and confessed to murdering Asma Begum, a 58-year-old mother of four, in the home they shared because she had refused him sex.

The next day, a lift operator at Quetta’s government-run Civil hospital threw acid on a 29-year-old doctor, Mahnoor Nasir, when she opened her door. The suspect was later killed during police efforts to detain him as he allegedly tried to flee the city. Nasir, who sustained burns to 35% of her body, was airlifted to Karachi for treatment.

Two days later, on 7 June, an unconscious 17-year-old girl in Jhang, Punjab, was dumped at a hospital by three men. Police arrested suspects using CCTV footage from the hospital. They said the girl had been kidnapped, drugged and gang-raped. She later died.

Also in June, shortly before dying from complications related to multiple abortions, an 18-year-old housemaid told police in Lahore that she had been repeatedly raped by her employer’s son and his driver.

“The severity of violence has gone through the roof,” says Dr Summaiya Syed-Tariq, the chief police surgeon in Pakistan’s Sindh provincial health department, who has spent 26 years documenting violence in Karachi’s medico-legal system.

I made a youtube video talking about the upcoming social media ban for under 16 year olds in the UK.

I think it's a bad idea for a lot of reasons, and that it's mostly a way to get through digital ID.

Why do people think the world is "feminised", even though women are still significantly underrepresented in politics, leadership and media representation?

Because people don't notice the absence of women, but they notice the presence of any women, no matter how few.

"When underrepresentation is the everyday default, even the presence of a lone minority can start to feel like ‘plenty,’ while a small handful may already seem like ‘too many.’ Our stereotype-saturated minds can pull a strange trick: we overestimate — sometimes wildly — how many women and minority-group members are actually present in a given environment.

In another relatively recent study published in BMJ Open, more than 400 medical professionals in the UK were asked to estimate the proportion of women across different areas of medicine — general practice, medical specialities, surgical specialities — and in various professional roles. Yet despite working in the field themselves and presumably having a better grasp of its demographics than the general public, participants consistently overestimated the number of women in nearly every category.3 The largest distortion occurred in surgery, where respondents estimated that women made up around 25% of surgery consultants/GPs, when the real figure was only 14%. And, as in the PNAS study, both female and male participants showed comparable levels of overestimation.

"The men of my tribe [extended family] threw my relative Kawthar Bashar al-Husayjawi, 15, into a pit and put a little dirt over her body. They had killed her hours earlier with 10 bullets, and split her small head with an axe. My family then joined others in coming on to the streets to dance and celebrate her death.

Kawthar lived in al-Nahrawan, a district in the south-east of Baghdad. She had been taken out of school and at age 13 forced to marry an alcoholic years older than her."

"Hussle, 27, describes himself as an OnlyFans manager. Others view him as an e-pimp, although he rejects this description as “cringe”. He says he makes his money by taking a 50% cut of the earnings of women who sell videos of themselves performing provocative or explicit content on the website OnlyFans. Hussle, whose real name is Markuss Kohs, runs a digital marketing agency that encourages men to buy clips of the women he manages removing their clothes.

And yet the targets almost always hold no power. For lack of a better word, lolcows are “nobodies.” They are highly visible online precisely because they lack the kind of protection afforded to other members of society. What does it mean to demand accountability from a homeless man with schizophrenia? What punishment could you inflict that life hasn’t already? Surely, there is an abusive CEO—or politician, or priest, or soccer coach—out there equally “deserving” of harassment. But in those cases, the lolcow dynamic would be impossible to replicate. Most powerful people aren’t isolated, sourcing their only human connection from the internet. If their cringeworthy video went viral, friends or family members would tell them to delete it, to stop replying to comments, to walk away. If the harassment escalated, they’d hire a lawyer. So while a scandal involving a powerful institution might briefly dominate the news cycle, it rarely manifests the kind of long-term participatory obsession that surrounds a lolcow. A politician who lies may be criticized for a week, but a mentally ill livestreamer who behaves erratically may be taunted for years. The crowd returns, day after day, to the person least capable of defending themselves.

"“I didn’t think he would stop at animals. I knew the connection between animal abuse and domestic abuse,” she said. “When the police came to the door, we knew nothing else could possibly have happened to her. We didn’t suspect a car accident or anything like that; we just said: ‘What has he done to her?’”

Holly, 26, was killed by Metson in March 2023 in what prosecutors described as a “twisted and barbaric” attack, cutting Holly’s body into more than 200 pieces, which were later discovered by a member of the public.

Bramley is now campaigning for Holly’s Law in her daughter’s memory, to stop prolific animal abusers from being able to acquire more pets, and to raise awareness of the link between animal and domestic abuse.

She wants to see an animal abuse register and a scheme to allow police to disclose information on animal abuse and neglect to prevent perpetrators acquiring more pets.

The characterization can even be a positive one, such as “All mothers love their children.” It might be difficult to recognize this statement as a sexist one since it makes an unqualified positive statement about women who have children, but its sexism consists in the attribution of an undivided symbolic identity to all childbearing women. According to the logic of this statement, women are not subjects but substantial beings. If mothers were subjects, some would love their children, but some would not. And even those who did would have times when they didn’t. The alienated subject is not identical with itself but desires in contradictory ways.