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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
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      Republicans seethe with violence and lies. Texas is part of a bigger war they’re waging | Rebecca Solnit

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      OpinionRepublicansRepublicans seethe with violence and lies. Texas is part of a bigger war they’re wagingRebecca SolnitThis extremist vigilante abortion law is of a piece with everything else Republicans are doing: overturning democracy itself Fri 3 Sep 2021 06.22 EDTLast modified on Fri 3 Sep 2021 12.51 EDTThe American right has been drunk on its freedom from two kinds of inhibition since Donald Trump appeared to guide them into the promised land of their unleashed ids. One is the inhibition from lies, the other from violence. Both are ways members of civil society normally limit their own actions out of respect for the rights of others and the collective good. Those already strained limits have snapped for leading Republican figures, from Tucker Carlson on Fox News to Ted Cruz in the Senate and for their followers.We’ve watched those followers gulp down delusions from Pizzagate to Qanon to Covid denialism to Trump’s election lies. And rough up journalists, crash vehicles into and wave weapons at Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist protesters at least since Charlottesville, menace statehouses, issue threats to doctors and school boards testifying about public health, and plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, for imposing Covid-prevention protocols.The Texas abortion law that the rightwing supreme court just smiled upon, despite its violation of precedent, seethes with both violence and lies. The very language of the law is a lie, a familiar one in which six-week embryos are called fetuses and a heartbeat is attributed to the cluster of cells that is not yet a heart not yet powering a circulatory system.Behind it are other lies, in which women have abortions because they are reckless, wanton and callous, rather than, in the great number of cases, because of the failure of birth control, or coercive sex, or medical problems, including threats to the health of the mother or a non-viable pregnancy, and financial problems, including responsibility for existing children.But what was new about the Texas bill is its invitation to its residents to become vigilantes, bounty hunters and snitches. This will likely throw a woman who suspects she is pregnant into a hideous state of fearful secrecy, because absolutely anyone can profit off her condition and anyone who aids her, from the driver to the doctor, is liable. It makes pregnancy a crime, since it is likely to lead to the further criminalization even of the significant percentage of pregnancies that end in miscarriage. It will lead women – particularly the undocumented, poor, the young, those under the thumbs of abusive spouses or families – to die of life-threatening pregnancies or illicit abortions or suicide out of despair. A vigilante who goes after a woman is willing to see her die.The rightwing stance on abortion is often treated as a contradiction coming from a political sector that sings in praise of unfettered liberty to do as you like, including carry semiautomatic weapons in public and spread a sometimes fatal virus. But like the attack on voting rights in Texas happening simultaneously with the attack on reproductive rights, it is of course about expanding liberty for some while withering it away for others. The attacks on reproductive rights seek to make women unfree and unequal; the attacks on voting rights seek to make people of color unfree and unequal; women of color get a double dose.Texas now has abortion ‘bounty hunters’: Sonia Sotomayor’s scathing legal dissentRead moreThis is the logical outcome of a party that, some decades back, looked at an increasingly non-white country and decided to try to suppress the votes of people of color rather than win them. Not just the Democratic party but democracy is their enemy. In this system in which some animals are more equal than others, some have the right to determine the truth more than others, and facts, science, history are likewise fetters to be shaken loose in pursuit of exactly your very own favorite version of reality, which you enforce through dominance, including outright violence.What was the 6 January coup attempt but this practice writ large? A mountain of lies about the outcome of an election was used to whip up a vigilante mob into an attack not just on Congress but on the ratification of the election results and death threats against the vice-president and against Speaker Pelosi. The sheer berserker-style violence of it was extraordinary, the mostly middle-aged mostly white mostly men trying to gouge out eyeballs and trampling their own underfoot while screaming and spraying bear spray in the faces of those guarding the building and the elected officials within and the election.Their leaders produced lies that instigated the violence, lies to justify that violence, lies to deny the existence of that violence, and then lies to stir up further violence. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who by his own account furiously begged Trump to call off the attackers, has since been trying to sabotage the investigation into what happened.As the New York Times reported this week: “Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, has threatened to retaliate against any company that complies with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 riot, after the panel asked dozens of firms to preserve the phone and social media records of 11 far-right members of Congress who pushed to overturn the results of the 2020 election.” He is trying to prevent Congress and the public from knowing what has gone on. Which you could also call covering up a crime, in public, and his threats may themselves constitute crimes.Madison Cawthorn, the North Carolina freshman congressman who appeared onstage on 6 January to whip up the crowd, calls the rioters “political prisoners” and continues to lie about the outcome of the 2020 election, declaring: “If our election systems continue to be rigged, continue to be stolen, it’s going to lead to one place and that’s bloodshed.” Cawthorne, like the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, like Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, whose votes set the Texas abortion law into action on Wednesday, has been accused of sexual misconduct.While men across the political spectrum are accused of similar wrongdoing – Andrew Cuomo’s conduct led to New York getting its first female governor last month – in the Republican case it is not an ideological inconsistency. The ideological premise is that one’s own rights matter so much that others’ rights do not matter at all, and that goes from rape to mask and vaccine policies to the proliferation of guns and gun deaths in recent years.There is no clear way to tell if the right is emboldened because they’ve gotten away with so much in the past five years, or whether they’re increasingly desperate because they are in a wild gamble, but it seems like both at once. If the US defends its democracy, such as it is, and protects the voting rights of all eligible adults, the right will continue to be a shrinking minority. Their one chance of overturning that requires overturning democracy itself. That’s one goal they’re willing to use violence to achieve and no longer bothering to lie about.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist and the author of Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
      TopicsRepublicansOpinionAbortionWomenUS politicsTexasGendercommentReuse this content More

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      Most extreme abortion law in US takes effect in Texas

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      TexasMost extreme abortion law in US takes effect in TexasUS supreme court fails to act to block near-total ban that allows private citizens to sue abortion providers Mary TumaWed 1 Sep 2021 07.25 EDTLast modified on Wed 1 Sep 2021 15.19 EDTThe most radical abortion law in the US has gone into effect, despite legal efforts to block it.A near-total abortion ban in Texas empowers any private citizen to sue an abortion provider who violates the law, opening the floodgates to harassing and frivolous lawsuits from anti-abortion vigilantes that could eventually shutter most clinics in the state.It’s time to brace ourselves for a world without Roe v Wade. Here’s what we must do | Kathryn Kolbert and Julie F KayRead more“Abortion access will be thrown into absolute chaos,” says Amanda Williams, executive director of the abortion support group the Lilith Fund, a plaintiff in the suit that challenged the law. “Unfortunately, many people who need access the most will slip through the cracks, as we have seen over the years with the relentless attacks here in our state.“It is unbelievable that Texas politicians have gotten away with this devastating and cruel law that will harm so many.”Senate Bill 8, ushered through the Republican-dominated Texas legislature and signed into law by the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, in May, bars abortion once embryonic cardiac activity is detected, which is around six weeks, and offers no exceptions for rape or incest. Texas is the first state to ban abortion this early in pregnancy since Roe v Wade, and last-minute efforts to halt it through an appeal to the US supreme court by Tuesday did not succeed.While a dozen other states have passed similar so-called “heartbeat” bills, they have all been blocked by the courts. The Texas version is novel in that it is intentionally designed to shield government officials from enforcement, and thus make legal challenges more difficult to secure. It instead incentivizes any private citizen in the US to bring civil suit against an abortion provider or anyone who “aids or abets” the procedure.The law “immediately and catastrophically reduces abortion access in Texas”, say state abortion providers, and will probably force many abortion clinics to ultimately close. It will prevent the majority of Texas women (85%) from accessing abortion care, as most aren’t aware they are pregnant as early as six weeks.Planned Parenthood, which operates 11 clinics in the state, and Whole Woman’s Health clinics told the Guardian they would comply with the extreme law despite the fact that it is contrary to their best medical practices. In the days leading up to the law’s enactment, Texas clinics say they have been forced to turn away patients who need abortion care at the law’s cutoff point this week and into the near future.Some abortion physicians in Texas have opted to discontinue offering services, choosing to forgo the potential risk of frivolous and costly lawsuits. For instance, most of the physicians across the four Whole Woman’s Health clinics in Texas will not continue care to prevent jeopardizing their livelihoods, said the clinic founder, Amy Hagstrom Miller.‘Radicalized’ anti-abortion movement poses increased threat, US warnedRead more“We are all going to comply with the law even though it is unethical, inhumane, and unjust,” Dr Ghazaleh Moayedi, a Texas abortion provider and OB-GYN, said. “It threatens my livelihood and I fully expect to be sued. But my biggest fear is making sure the most vulnerable in my community, the Black and Latinx patients I see, who are already most at risk from logistical and financial barriers, get the care they need.”The law will force most patients to travel out of state for care, increasing the driving distance to an abortion clinic twentyfold – from an average of 12 miles to 248 miles one-way, nearly 500 miles round-trip, the Guttmacher Institute found. And that is only if patients have the resources to do so, including time off work, ability to pay for the procedure, and in some cases childcare.Providers and abortion fund support groups – who help finance travel, lodging, and direct service for low-income women through donations – have spent months scrambling to coordinate with out-of-state clinics, including in New Mexico and Colorado, to ensure patients receive timely care when SB8 goes into effect. Last year, the state was offered a glimpse of what would happen if abortion care ceased: when the state barred most abortion procedures amid the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, the number of patients who traveled out of state for care jumped nearly 400%.Many abortion-seeking women are expected to be delayed until later in pregnancy and others will be forced to carry pregnancy to term or try to end their pregnancies without medical oversight, abortion providers caution. As with most abortion restrictions, low-income women and women of color will bear the greatest burden under SB8.Physicians are not the only ones that could be targeted under SB8: a breathtakingly wide range of people and groups, including clinic nurses, abortion fund workers, domestic violence and rape crisis counselors, or even a family member who offers a car ride to the clinic could now face suit from strangers. Those who sue can collect a minimum of $10,000 if they win, but if providers are legally successful they cannot recoup any legal payment. The law, say providers, will spur abortion “bounty hunters”.The law’s radical legal provision is the first of its kind in the country.The state’s major anti-abortion lobby group, Texas Right to Life, have already helped empower anti-abortion activists to enforce the law by creating a website that invites “whistleblowers” to report violations of SB8. (In response, pro-choice advocates have flooded the digital entry forms with satirical information.)Abortion providers, funds, and clergy members, represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the American Civil Liberties Union, filed suit against SB8 in July, writing that the law would “create absolute chaos in Texas and irreparably harm Texans in need of abortion services.”A preliminary injunction hearing was originally set for Monday 30 August in federal court. However, the largely conservative fifth circuit court of appeals cancelled the hearing on Sunday afternoon and denied the plaintiffs’ request to allow the district court to block the law. Providers then appealed to the US supreme court for emergency relief.But the court failed to act before the law took effect on Wednesday, allowing it to proceed. While the nation’s high court, which now holds a strong anti-choice contingent, plans to consider a Mississippi 15-week ban that could test Roe v Wade during the next term, its lack of action in the Texas case signals the possible early unraveling of Roe.Texas is already one of the most difficult states in the US in which to access abortion due to a slew of state laws pushed by the Republican-dominated legislature over the past decade, including a 24-hour waiting period, a 20-week abortion ban, restrictions on telemedicine, and a prohibition on private and public insurance. It is home to the highest number of abortion deserts – cities in which an abortion-seeking patient must travel at least 100 miles for care – in the country.Following the passage of a 2013 multi-part law known as House Bill 2, roughly half of the state’s abortion clinics shuttered – dropping from 40 to less than 20. While the law was eventually struck down by the US supreme court in 2016, many clinics were unable to reopen. Large swaths of the state – including the Panhandle and west Texas – are without an abortion clinic, forcing women to travel great distances for care.TopicsTexasAbortionGenderUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      A leaked S&M video won’t keep Zack Weiner out of politics – and nor should it | Arwa Mahdawi

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      You have to be something of a masochist to want to get into politics – and Zack Weiner is an unapologetic masochist. Last week, the 26-year-old, who is running for a place on the city council in New York, was something of a nonentity: he had zero name recognition and his campaign had raised just over $10,000 (£7,200), most of which he had donated himself.Perhaps the most notable thing about Weiner was the fact his dad is the co-creator of the kids’ TV show Dora the Explorer. But that changed when a video of a man engaged in consensual sadomasochism was posted on Twitter by an anonymous account that claimed the man was Weiner. On Saturday, the New York Post ran a story about the video, complete with salacious screengrab. Pretty soon it made international headlines.Why would anyone care about the sex life of an unknown twentysomething running for local office? Well, because a lot of people are pervs, for one thing. But the main reason the story has become so popular is because of how Weiner responded. Instead of going on the defensive, he owned it. His own campaign manager was the one who tipped off the New York Post about the video and Weiner told the paper that he is a “proud BDSMer”, who has nothing to be ashamed of.“Whoops. I didn’t want anyone to see that, but here we are,” Weiner later wrote on Twitter. “Like many young people, I have grown into a world where some of our most private moments have been documented online. While a few loud voices on Twitter might chastise me for the video, most people see the video for what it is: a distraction.”Weiner’s response to the video is almost identical to a plotline from the TV show BillionsThe frank and dignified way in which Weiner handled this episode has, quite rightly, earned him a lot of praise. It is, in many ways, a masterclass in how to respond to revenge porn.There was some speculation that the video was a publicity stunt. Releasing a sex tape of yourself in order to kickstart a political career might once have been unthinkable, but in today’s attention economy it is all too plausible. Donald Trump taught the world that any idiot can get into politics as long as you find a way to keep your name in the headlines.Then there’s the fact that Weiner’s response to the video is almost identical to a plotline from the TV show Billions. “I’m a masochist,” the character Chuck Rhoades announces in a press conference after a political rival threatens to leak pictures of him enjoying sadomasochistic sex in an attempt to derail his campaign for state attorney general for New York. Rhoades’s speech is a huge success: he goes on to win the election.So is it possible that Weiner’s campaign, inspired by Billions, might have leaked the video itself? Absolutely not, Joseph Gallagher, Weiner’s campaign manager, told me. He added, for good measure, that neither he nor Weiner, who is also an actor and screenwriter, had ever watched the TV show. The reason he flagged the video to the Post, he clarified, was in order to control the narrative and get ahead of the story. Which makes sense.Ultimately, what’s important is the fact that, as Weiner pointed out, a generation of young people who have documented every part of their lives are starting to enter politics. Revenge porn, which has already helped derail the political career of the former congresswoman Katie Hill, is going to become a common political weapon. And I suspect female politicians will have a far harder time surviving the weaponisation of their personal lives than men. More

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      ‘It’s a scandal, quite frankly’: US Equal Rights Amendment still faces uphill battle

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      With renewed attention on anti-discrimination policies following the #MeToo movement and a record number of women serving in Congress, a nearly century-long effort to explicitly enshrine gender equality in the United States constitution may finally be coming to a head.If the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) were incorporated into America’s founding document, it would represent a huge victory for women and people across the gender spectrum, whose fundamental rights are too often tied to partisan disagreements.But amid legal controversies, disingenuous talking points and a chronic lack of urgency, the landmark amendment still faces an uphill battle.“It’s outrageous – a scandal, quite frankly – that women still have to be in the begging position for their rights,” said Carol Jenkins, president and chief executive of the ERA Coalition and the Fund for Women’s Equality.First drafted in 1923 and revised over the years, the proposed article is a constitutional guarantee that the “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”. It would also give Congress the power to enforce gender equality through legislation, and would take effect two years after ratification.Proponents argue the ERA would send a powerful signal and be used as a tool to effectively challenge restrictions and loopholes currently undermining people’s hard-won protections.As chronicled in last year’s hit television series Mrs America, the fight for the ERA ramped up in the 1970s, bolstered by a strong feminist movement. But it quickly garnered enemies in the form of conservatives with traditional values, who would eventually ensure its demise.It’s outrageous – a scandal, quite frankly – that women still have to be in the begging position for their rightsWhen Congress passed the ERA in 1972, lawmakers imposed a seven-year deadline for ratification by at least 38 states. That time limit eventually got extended to 1982, but in the meantime, anti-feminist attacks haunted messaging around the amendment, stifling progress.By the early 1980s, proponents were only able to drum up support from 35 states – three short of the required threshold – even as Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho, Kentucky and South Dakota tried to invalidate their previous decisions to ratify.“We will not again seriously pursue the ERA until we’ve made a major dent in changing the composition of Congress as well as the state legislatures,” said Eleanor Smeal, then the president of the National Organization for Women.The ERA languished for decades, nominally re-introduced in Congress year after year but largely sidelined and ignored. Then, during Donald Trump’s incendiary tenure that brought the plight of American women into stark relief, three holdout states, Nevada, Illinois and Virginia, ratified back to back.Suddenly, nearly 100 years of advocacy had reached its apex: the endorsement of 38 states. But the former president’s justice department claimed the new ratifications didn’t pass muster, setting up a showdown over whether Congress’ arbitrary deadline rendered them moot.Last month, a federal judge weighed in, dismissing arguments made by several state attorneys general who were trying to get the ERA certified as the 28th amendment. The deadline “expired long ago”, the judge wrote, and recent ratifications “came too late to count”.Similarly, debate persists over whether the five states that tried to rescind, withdraw or sunset their approvals can actually do so, although precedent around past amendments suggests they probably can’t. In March, North Dakota lawmakers nevertheless voted to rescind their support as well.Despite so many roadblocks, the ERA’s proponents are still looking for ways to finish the work their predecessors started soon after successfully advocating for the right to vote.“Really, at this point, I think we’re just trying to get it done. We’re just trying to get this on the books,” said Robin Bleiweis, a research associate with the Women’s Initiative at the Center for American Progress.Last year, and again several weeks ago, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted largely along partisan lines to remove the ERA’s congressional deadline, shirking the justice department’s guidance under Trump.The amendment now faces an uncertain fate in the Senate, where only two Republicans – Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins – have jumped onboard. While anti-abortion lawmakers lean hard on the lightning rod as their reason to oppose the ERA, advocates are trying to convince a larger cohort of right-leaning senators such as Shelley Moore Capito and Mitt Romney to cross party lines.“We’ve lived this way, unequally, for as long as we’ve been in existence, and to some extent we can’t quite grasp that we actually can change this,” Jenkins said. “But it requires now, at this moment, 60 votes in the Senate.”If all other options flounder, Congress can always propose the amendment anew, restarting the ratification process.“We’re never gonna give up – never, ever, ever,” the New York representative Carolyn Maloney, an outspoken champion of the amendment, told the Guardian. “Failure’s impossible.”Without the ERA, Americans are left at the whims of three mercurial government branches, which can bolster rights but also take them away.Attorneys have been able to secure major triumphs for women by arguing that the 14th amendment, which mandates “the equal protection of the laws”, applies to gender equality. But not everyone on the bench agrees.“Certainly the constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t,” the late supreme court justice Antonin Scalia said.If the ERA were to succeed, individuals would finally be armed with irrefutable proof of their right to gender equality under the constitution. That, in turn, could help them defend themselves from discrimination and prevent their lives and livelihoods from becoming political footballs.“I don’t think that our rights should be dependent on who has the majority in Congress, or who’s the speaker, or who’s the majority leader in the Senate, or who’s the president, or who’s on the supreme court,” Maloney said.“If you are bedrock protected in the constitution, then they can’t roll back your rights. They have to work off that document.”The ERA enjoys overwhelming support, with backing from anywhere between 78% and 94% of Americans, according to two surveys.Life under Trump made clear to many citizens that misogyny still underpins American society and government. The single-term commander-in-chief was elected to the nation’s highest office in 2016 despite his comments about grabbing women by the genitals, on tape. He has faced few repercussions for more than 20 sexual misconduct allegations lodged against him.Just after Trump’s inauguration, millions took to the streets for the Women’s March, the largest single-day protest in US history. Soon, pink “pussyhats” – a reference to his degrading and predatory comments about women – became a symbol of resistance.But as critics decried Trump’s alleged misconduct and vitriol, he spent four years elevating policies and people on the wrong side of women’s rights – perhaps most famously Brett Kavanaugh, another alleged perpetrator.After televised, high-profile hearings watched by millions, where Christine Blasey Ford carefully recounted how Kavanaugh violated her, he nevertheless slid onto the Supreme Court for a lifetime appointment. Two years later, so did Amy Coney Barrett, a judge who’s notoriously ambivalent on reproductive rights.Their confirmations – alongside the appointments of more than 200 federal judges, many of them ideological and rightwing – underscored the serious risks that exist in a world without the ERA.“A lot of what has been gained is judge-made law, and you can rest on your laurels and think it’s all secure. But in fact, there’s a long history of the courts eroding and diminishing rights previously recognized by the courts,” said John Kowal, vice-president of programs at the Brennan Center for Justice.Meanwhile, the safeguards that currently exist have failed to shield American women from an endless cycle of hardship and victimization. In a country that has never elected a female president, where women still make 82 cents to a man’s dollar, a whopping 42% of working women say they have suffered gender discrimination while on the job.Almost one in five women experience completed or attempted rape, while nearly one in four are subjected to severe physical violence by an intimate partner.Even though the supreme court established the right to an abortion back in the 1970s, state legislatures are still waging a war against comprehensive reproductive care, introducing more than 500 abortion restrictions this year alone.And, faced with the US’s segregated labor market amid a recession connected to the coronavirus pandemic, women have shed a net 5.4m jobs – a million more than their male counterparts.“Gender inequality is rarely talked about like a crisis,” Bleiweis said.“Long-term, disparate treatment that, you know, pushes people into poverty, into violence – that is absolutely a crisis, and should be treated as such.” More

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      US Navy: for first time in history four women of color command war ships

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      Four US Navy officers have made history this week – and breaking new ground in a traditionally white and male-dominated field.For the first time in US Navy history, four women of color are now commanding war ships at the same time, NBC News has reported.The four officers, Kimberly Jones, LaDonna Simpson, Kristel O’Cañas, and Kathryn Wijnaldum, recently said that there have been dramatic changes for women serving in the Navy over the years.The Navy “looks different in the fact that as an ensign, I looked around and at that time, there were not many senior female officers that I could necessarily go to for gender-specific questions,” Jones, who joined the Navy more than two decades ago, remarked in an interview clip obtained by People magazine.“I may not have felt comfortable asking my male boss,” Jones also said. “Now, to their credit, they were phenomenal leaders. However, when it came time [for] some of those more intimate conversations on how to plan your career with a family, as a mom, that did not exist.”She added: “And I was overseas, so the population was slightly smaller. And now walking this waterfront, there are leaders, there are role models, at every rank…That is something that I hope ensigns, young sailors, gravitate towards and take advantage of.”These four women are all based at Norfolk Naval Station, in Virginia. They are all “Nuclear Surface Warfare Officers” – a qualification which is “extremely competitive” to obtain, according to the US Navy.All four women “have spent a considerable amount of their time serving aboard nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and in nuclear-related shore duty billets,” the Navy noted.Simpson said that while she was never discouraged from going after her career goals, she did not have many female role models.“The Navy has been very supportive of my journey and my professional training. There weren’t any voices in the Navy that said that I could not achieve this goal,” Simpson said. “The only limitation was the fact that women as a whole hadn’t been on board combatant vessels until, I believe, it was 1994.” More

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      The Guardian view on women and the pandemic: what happened to building back better? | Editorial

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      One year into the pandemic, women have little cause to celebrate International Women’s Day tomorrow, and less energy to battle for change. Men are more likely to die from Covid-19. But women have suffered the greatest economic and social blows. They have taken the brunt of increased caregiving, have been more likely to lose their jobs and have seen a sharp rise in domestic abuse.In the UK, women did two-thirds of the extra childcare in the first lockdown, and were more likely to be furloughed. In the US, every one of the 140,000 jobs lost in December belonged to a woman: they saw 156,000 jobs disappear, while men gained 16,000. But white women actually made gains, while black and Latina women – disproportionately in jobs that offer no sick pay and little flexibility – lost out. Race, wealth, disability and migration status have all determined who is hit hardest. Previous experience suggests that the effects of health crises can be long-lasting: in Sierra Leone, over a year after Ebola broke out, 63% of men had returned to work but only 17% of women.The interruption to girls’ education is particularly alarming: Malala Fund research suggests that 20 million may never return to schooling. The United Nations Population Fund warns that there could be an extra 13 million child marriages over the next decade, and 7 million more unplanned pregnancies; both provision of and access to reproductive health services has been disrupted. In the US, Ohio and Texas exploited disease control measures to reduce access to abortions. The UN has described the surge in domestic violence which began in China and swept around the world as a “shadow pandemic”. Research has even suggested that the pandemic may lead to more restrictive ideas about gender roles, with uncertainty promoting conservatism.Coronavirus has not created inequality or misogyny. It has exacerbated them and laid them bare. Structural problems such as the pay gap, as well as gendered expectations, explain why women have taken on more of the extra caregiving. The pandemic’s radicalising effect has echoes of the #MeToo movement. Women knew the challenges they faced, but Covid has confronted them with unpalatable truths at both intimate and institutional levels.In doing so, it has created an opportunity to do better. Germany has given parents an extra 10 days paid leave to cover sickness or school and nursery closures, and single parents 20. Czech authorities have trained postal workers to identify potential signs of domestic abuse. But the deeper task is to rethink our flawed economies and find ways to reward work that is essential to us all. So far, there are precious few signs of building back better.Around 70% of health and social care workers globally are female, and they are concentrated in lower-paid, lower-status jobs. They deserve a decent wage. The 1% rise offered to NHS workers in the UK is an insult. The government also needs to bail out the childcare sector: without it, women will not return to work. It has not done equality impact assessments on key decisions – and it shows. The budget has admittedly earmarked £19m for tackling domestic violence, but Women’s Aid estimates that £393m is needed. And the UK is slashing international aid at a time when spending on services such as reproductive health is more essential than ever. Nonetheless, as a donor, it should at least press recipient governments to prioritise women in their recovery plans.Overworked and undervalued women have more awareness than ever of the need for change, and less capacity to press for it. Men too must play their part. Some have recognised more fully the demands of childcare and housework, and seen the potential benefits of greater involvement at home. Significant “use it or lose it” paternity leave might help to reset expectations both in families and the workplace. There were never easy solutions, and many look harder than ever. But the pandemic has shown that we can’t carry on like this. More