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      ‘Medium is the message’: AOC defends ‘tax the rich’ dress worn to Met Gala

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez‘Medium is the message’: AOC defends ‘tax the rich’ dress worn to Met Gala‘The time is now for childcare, healthcare and climate action for all,’ the congresswoman wrote on Instagram02:25Alexandra VillarrealTue 14 Sep 2021 14.06 EDTFirst published on Tue 14 Sep 2021 09.25 EDTWhen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a white gown with the message “tax the rich” emblazoned in red to the Met Gala, one of New York’s swankiest events, she was sure to ruffle some feathers.The Met Gala 2021: eight key moments from fashion’s big nightRead moreCritics duly disparaged the move as both hypocritical and tone deaf. The New York congresswoman, a leading House progressive, was happy to set the record straight.“The medium is the message,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Instagram.“NYC elected officials are regularly invited to and attend the Met due to our responsibilities in overseeing our city’s cultural institutions that serve the public. I was one of several in attendance. Dress is borrowed.”Ocasio-Cortez was also determined to use the spotlight to reiterate her commitment to principles that have made her both an icon and a lightning rod on the national political scene, widely known by her initials, AOC.“The time is now for childcare, healthcare and climate action for all,” she wrote. “Tax the Rich.”The dress turned heads at arguably the hottest red carpet event of the year. Ocasio-Cortez lauded Aurora James, the Black, immigrant creative director and founder of luxury brand ​​Brother Vellies, for helping her “kick open the doors” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.“Fashion is changing, America is changing,” James said, according to Vogue. “I think Alexandria and I are a great embodiment of the language fashion needs to consider adding to the general lexicon as we work towards a more sustainable, inclusive and empowered future.”Fans dubbed the look “simply iconic” and called Ocasio-Cortez “an anti-capitalist queen”. Some appreciated that when surrounded by the elite, Ocasio-Cortez chose to flash a message meant to make fellow guests sweat.“AOC wearing this dress at an event full of rich people … this woman has more balls than any man in Congress,” one supporter tweeted.Detractors across the political spectrum highlighted what they saw as hypocrisy.“If [AOC] hates the rich so much, why is she attending an event that only the wealthiest people in America can afford to attend?” asked writer David Hookstead.Vanessa Friedman, fashion director for the New York Times, called the disconnect between Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance at the gala and her message “a complicated proposition”.A leading progressive voice, Black Lives Matter Greater NY, accused the congresswoman of being “performative” and “not very socialist”, especially after protesters were arrested outside the Met.“If you wanted to party with celebs … we get it,” a statement said. “But this right here cannot be excused.”Others came to Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, noting how her dress made a “core message” go viral.In response to her critics, Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Instagram that she was accustomed to being “heavily and relentlessly policed from all corners politically”.“Ultimately the haters hated and the people who are thoughtful were thoughtful,” she wrote. “But we all had a conversation about Taxing the Rich in front of the very people who lobby against it, and punctured the fourth wall of excess and spectacle.”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezMet Gala 2021US taxationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Hillary Clinton: US still faces ‘real battle for democracy’ – video

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      Hillary Clinton said the US was still in a ‘real battle for our democracy’ against pro-Trump forces on the far right who are seeking to entrench minority rule and turn back the clock on women’s rights.
      Speaking at a Guardian Live event on Monday, Clinton said she believed there was majority support for Joe Biden’s agenda of huge investment in infrastructure and budget support for families. ‘But the other side wants to rule by minority,’ she told the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland

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      Condom ‘stealthing’ is a vile practice. California is right to ban it | Moira Donegan

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      OpinionUS politicsCondom ‘stealthing’ is a vile practice. California is right to ban itMoira DoneganTwelve per cent of women have experienced stealthing – and 10% of men have perpetrated it. The law is finally catching up Tue 14 Sep 2021 06.19 EDTLast modified on Tue 14 Sep 2021 06.20 EDTShe told him a condom was “non-negotiable,” and that if he would rather not use one, she would leave. The young woman, identified as “Sara” in a 2017 study, describes the encounter, saying, “I set a boundary. I was very explicit.” Yet she then discovered that her partner, a man she’d been seeing for a couple of weeks, had secretly removed the condom during sex.“I ended up talking to him about it later,” Sara told the study’s author, the feminist civil rights attorney Alexandra Brodsky. “He told me, ‘Don’t worry about it, trust me.’ That stuck with me, because he’d literally proven himself to be unworthy of my trust.”The man who removed the condom was telling her to trust him not to put her at risk for the potential consequences of unprotected sex – for STD infection, or for unplanned pregnancy. But if he was someone she could trust on those issues, he never would have removed the condom in the first place.Sara was a victim of a phenomenon that 12% of women say they have experienced, and that 10% of men say they have perpetrated, but which for years has had no legal recognition and no name other than the one given to it by its practitioners: “Stealthing”, the non-consensual removal of a condom.Now, the violation experienced by Sara and others may finally be made illegal, at least in one state. A bill introduced by California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia has passed both houses of the state’s legislature, and would make non-consensual condom removal a civil offense. It now awaits a signature from Governor Gavin Newsom.If the bill goes into effect, it would give victims the power to sue men who removed condoms without their permission for the non-criminal charge of sexual battery and open the door for monetary damages. The Wisconsin and New York legislatures are considering similar bills. If California’s is signed, the state will become the first in the nation to recognize stealthing as a violation in law.Because the bill makes stealthing a civil offense, not a crime, it does not create the possibility that perpetrators will serve prison time. Instead, it makes them liable for fines and penalties if their victims prevail in court. (The pending bills in Wisconsin and New York do have criminal provisions.) But Brodsky believes that the worthiness of a civil avenue for justice should not be overlooked. “I’m glad to see California pursuing this approach,” she told me. “In my experience, many survivors find the kinds of outcomes available in civil litigation – including money damages – more meaningful and useful.”Brodsky points out that civil courts have lower burdens of proof and offer rewards for the victims, not only punishments for the assailants. The symbolic value of the bill, too, is worth noting: the possibility for stealthing victims to have their day in court, and be remunerated for the harm they suffered, offers a route to recognition for a kind of sexual abuse that institutions have historically ignored.For women like Sara, the reality that what their partners did to them was not right is intuitive. In Brodsky’s study, victims of stealthing recount being worried about STIs and pregnancy. These worries, they observed, seem to fall almost exclusively on their shoulders, even though the removal of the condom had not been their idea and had happened without their permission. One woman, referred to as “Rebecca”, told Brodsky that after the incident, her assailant refused to help her pay for emergency contraceptives.“None of it worried him,” she said. “It didn’t perturb him. My potential pregnancy, my potential STI. That was my burden.” Rebecca had a reason to be worried: a 2019 survey on stealthing found that men who engaged in the practice were much more likely to be infected with an STD than men who didn’t (at a rate of 29.5% to 15.1%) and were much more likely to have sired an unintended pregnancy (at a rate of 46.7% to 25.8%).But in addition to the medical and material concerns, women and others who have been victims of stealthing describe the incidents as degrading, hurtful and wounding to their self-respect. The removal of the condom represents a willingness to discard their preferences, an indifference to their safety and a contempt for their right to control their own bodies – and all of this comes from men who, only a few moments earlier, they had believed they could trust.There is empirical evidence to support their sense of betrayal: the 2019 survey found that men who engaged in stealthing also had greater hostility towards women. In Brodsky’s study, a review of online communities for stealthing practitioners supports the notion that non-consensual condom removal by heterosexual men is motivated by misogynist disdain; the men, quoted at length, spoke of their own contempt for women and scorn for their partners’ desire for a condom in terms that I will not repeat here.Stealthing poses high-stakes material risks to victims, as well as deeply felt harms to their dignity. It is galling that the practice was not already illegal. Both our law and our culture have a long history of ignoring gendered violence, and of lacking the rhetorical frameworks that make such harm legible – even when, as seems to be true in the case of stealthing, that harm is very common.Rebecca, the survivor quoted in the 2017 study, said that she fielded many calls about the practice in her job at a local rape crisis hotline. “The stories often start the same way: ‘I’m not sure this is rape, but …’”Melissa Sargent, the Wisconsin state representative who has sponsored the anti-stealthing bill there, also says she has been contacted by women who say they were victims of stealthing. “Everyone has their own story,” Sargent told the Associated Press. “But the common thread is, this happened to me, I knew it wasn’t right, but I didn’t know what to call it.”One hope is that the passage of the California law might help such victims know what to call it. The stealthing bill can help make clear and definite what might have otherwise been an inchoate sense of having been wronged. With the passage of the California bill, stealthing victims will be able to see themselves as worthy of dignity, of having a right to control their own bodies, and of being entitled to negotiate their own sex lives without coercion or tricks. And the law will see them that way, too.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionGenderRape and sexual assaultSexCaliforniacommentReuse this content More

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      Congress is on the cusp of passing the most pivotal bill in years – if we make them | Rebecca Solnit

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      OpinionUS politicsCongress is on the cusp of passing the most pivotal bill in years – if we make themRebecca SolnitThe dull-sounding ‘budget reconciliation’ may provide universal childcare and preschool, repeal fossil fuel subsidies and create a Climate Conservation Corps Tue 14 Sep 2021 06.15 EDTLast modified on Tue 14 Sep 2021 09.04 EDTWhat if the fate of the world was complicated and also, to most people, a bit boring? What if we got a chance to change the world or even save it, and hardly anyone noticed? I hardly dare to start this essay with the phrase “budget reconciliation” lest you be inspired to click elsewhere right away, but stick with me. This is important and also includes a Britney Spears sighting. Because the budget reconciliation bill is maybe the most important thing happening right now, in the long run, but the least dramatic, at least in how it’s being reported. By important I mean significant, for all of us, for the long-term future, for the lives of ordinary people and for the climate.Republicans once called government the problem – now they want to run your life | Robert ReichRead moreWhen it comes to news, interesting and important are too often adversaries. Maybe it’s partly about human nature. We evolved to pay attention to sudden and dramatic action and small groups and charismatic individuals, to violence and threat and tangible stuff, not to policy maneuvers and pie charts and economic indicators. Or maybe it’s that the news media knows how to cover wars and explosions and scandals and football scores better than legislation that might change the world or meaningful shifts in beliefs and practices. The sudden wins out over the slow, the simple over the complex, the concentrated over things diffused over large areas.I wrote here about the way the collapse of one building in Florida seemed to get more coverage than the heat dome covering much of North America for a few deadly days in July, during which well over a thousand people died, shellfish by the billion died along the north-west coast, fires broke out, a town burned down, millions suffered and records were broken by leaps and bounds. It was too dispersed and too complex a story to be told in the quick, compact formats of the news. The heat dome was not just a huge disaster, but a sign that the climate was getting more chaotic faster than anticipated.So wherever you were, at least by implication, it affected you. But it was drowned out by stories that didn’t. Some stories about a famous or intriguing person do have wider repercussions – Britney Spears’s recent struggle for self-determination has given us all a crash course in how abusive the US conservatorship system can be, and how well that intersects with everyday misogyny. Better yet, celebrities like Jane Fonda can function like spotlights, directing our attention to inherently important things, in her case via her Firehouse Fridays, to climate issues and how to do good work on them.By important I mean things that affect us – us the readers, us the public, us the life on Earth, now and to come. By that measure climate is more important than anything else. When it comes to climate, the stuff that will affect your life and mine and ours is often quite complicated, which can segue smoothly into byzantine or dull, which can merge into the overlooked and ignored. Or it’s slow-moving and undramatic, like the amount of clean power installed and the price of solar panels and the bits of legislation, say, banning gas hookups in new construction or mandating energy efficiency. Every once in a while, it’s like the Line 3 conflict, with an obvious villain in the pipeline company, heroes in the form of the indigenous-led water protectors, and a lot of dramatic action. But a lot of times it is legislation and incrementalism and budgets and big data.The budget reconciliation bill could be the single most important piece of climate legislation to date in this country, and it’s not certain whether it will pass or what exactly will be in it. Public pressure matters, which is why its low profile is maddening. The budget reconciliation bill is a cornucopia. It will probably include universal childcare and preschool! Medicare expansion! Raising taxes on the wealthy! Gobs of climate action that generates heaps of jobs! Possibly a Climate Conservation Corps, if, as Katie Porter pointed out in a recent talk, people demand it loudly and strongly enough! Repealing fossil fuel subsidies! None of this matters if it doesn’t pass (and there is some drama in the ways Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin are making themselves into obstructionists demanding to be placated).The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, says that the climate provisions in the bill would reduce US greenhouse gas emissions 45% below 2005 levels by 2030, doing most of the heavy lifting to get us back in line with our 2015 Paris climate pledge. It’s kind of a Green New Deal and it’s a big deal and it’s complicated, and there should be riots in the streets to support it and push it through. If the colossal carbon-dioxide contributor that is the USA finally gets it together, other nations are likely to follow (though of course many are already far ahead of us).Even though there are a lot of solid articles on the budget reconciliation process and its goals and obstacles and I get some mail from politicians – notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – about it, I see very little talk about it among the people I know and the people I follow. Maybe we’re telling the story wrong. Maybe we need more pieces about how the US Chamber of Commerce and fossil fuel industry would like your grandmother to die of heatstroke and the fossil fuel industry is conspiring for your cousin to drown in a subway. Legislation is what will keep them from doing so.The budget reconciliation doesn’t fix all our woes. But it does tremendous work, and there is hardly a better place for public attention right now – or a more alarming shortfall of same.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist and the author of Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionUS CongressDemocratscommentReuse this content More