[Trigger warning: mentions of rape, sexual assault, abortion and victim-blaming]
This week’s web round-up includes public shaming, Richard Dawkins and how black and Latina women are more likely to call themselves feminists than white women.
1) @MattBinder from Twitter has received a huge boost in web traffic over the last couple days through his popular Tumblr called Public Shaming: Tweets of Privilege. When teenage star football players Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richardson from Steubenville, Ohio were found guilty (or delinquent in juvenile court terms) on Sunday March 17, 2013 for raping a 16 year old girl, Twitter and other social media exploded with numerous hateful responses that blamed the survivor for her assault and expressed sympathy for Mays and Richardson who CNN mistakenly described as having “had such promising futures.”
Binder began retweeting and then taking screenshots of those victim-blaming, slut-shaming tweets which he then posted on his Public Shaming Tumblr. The sheer number of those tweets, which mostly include the full names of the Twitterers, was so staggering, they’ve been separated into three parts: 1, 2, 3.
Warning: the responses are just as disgusting as you’ve imagined and even more so than you’d expect.
2) Richard Dawkins — evolutionary biologist, author of the 2006 book The God Delusion, and world’s best known atheist — made another series of tactless remarks on March 13, 2013 when he tweeted about abortion. Dawkins not only equated fetal pain with “pig pain” but basically said that such pain mattered in place of a woman’s reproductive rights.
Fortunately, Ana Mardoll of the progressive, feminist blog Shakesville wrote in response to Dawkin’s tweets and deconstructs why his reasoning is both scientifically and morally unsound.
3) From a post written by MAYA of Feministing.com, a poll commissioned by Ms. magazine found that “55 percent of women voters and 30 percent of men voters consider themselves feminists.”
Some of the surprising facts included how “white women are considerably less likely than black and Latina women to claim the label” as feminist and how a majority of women voters (59%) consider themselves feminists.
For me, the most shocking is finding out how “so many self-identified feminists are Republicans.”
