everything.is.impermanent

If Congress passes the Paycheck Fairness Act, women are going to have access to more tools to claim equal pay for equal work. If they don’t, if Congress doesn’t act, then women are still going to have difficulty enforcing and pressing for this basic principle.

And we’ve got to understand this is more than just about fairness. Women are the breadwinners for a lot of families, and if they’re making less than men do for the same work, families are going to have to get by for less money for childcare and tuition and rent, small businesses have fewer customers. Everybody suffers.

Though no one would ever think of using the term honor violence (we reserve that descriptor for brown people who live somewhere else, motivated by religious something-or-other or tribal something-or-other), one-third of women murdered every year in the United States are killed by their intimate partners. In 2005 that amounted to 1,181 women, or three women every day. To put that in perspective, the UN estimates there are 5,000 honor killings every year in the entire world. 5,000 in a world of 6 billion versus nearly 1,200 in a single country of 300 million. In other words, a woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

You pack all these people into these compounds and you don’t have the staff nor the time nor the resources to really deal with why are you an inmate?” she explains. Solo then sharply criticizes current reductions in educational opportunities for incarcerated women, concluding “You cannot beat the sin out. You have to nurture the sin out…. You just want to beat me, beat me, beat me, punish me, punish me, punish me, and then expect me to come out of prison reformed! …At some point I”m just gonna become what you expect me to. I’m gonna be that monster.

There is a country where the leading cause of death of pregnant women is murder by a partner. In this same country, more than a million women were raped in 2008 and women are much more likely to live in poverty than men. Local laws don’t protect their right to bodily freedom and integrity; some rape laws even state that once a woman initially consents to sex, she doesn’t have the right to change her mind.

You may have caught on by now — yes, I’m talking about the United States.

“Slut” is just another way of saying “worthless” without having to come up with a reason. Little girls get called sluts before they even know what sex is.

If someone calls you a slut, there’s nothing you can say to refute the claim because it never had any cognitive content anyway.