We all know about the rape epidemic. But what can male readers of this blog, and the men in our lives, do about it? Heather Corinna has a brilliant article on just this subject, up at Scarlateen.

Here’s a small excerpt, but you should go read the whole thing:

Just like when we know that around one in four people have an STI we can’t realistically deny that we or someone close to us may be one of those people, the same goes here. A rapist may be someone we know, even someone we’re close to, or even a person reading this right now. It is tremendously hard to look at, I know, but all those men doing the raping are real people, and there are enough of them that many of us know or have known at least one of them. They’re not imaginary bogeymen: many are “regular” guys.

I hesitate to link to this next post, over at Fem Soc, because my own guest post about some of my favourite blogs right now, is riddled with spelling errors - introduced by me, so I only have myself to complain to. But I have to direct you to the post by Finn Mackay on how to organise your very own Reclaim the Night.

It’s full of good advice, such as:

Then you need to go and meet your friendly local police force (or armed agents of the state depending on your political proclivities) who are there to facilitate your right to peaceful protest. Because we live in a democracy, remember? It is good to send the least anarchisty members of your group to meet the police, and don’t call them ‘filth’ or ‘pigs’, at least not to their faces.

Quite. The Fem Soc blog is definitely going to be one to keep an eye on, with other familiar-to-regular-readers contributors including Red Chidgey, our very own zohra, and Kat Stark from the NUS.

Feministing has announced its forthcoming transformation from surely one of the most popular feminist blogs of all time, to a big community where anyone will be able to go set up their own personal blog.

In the news, the Feminist Majority Foundation reports the first woman has won a seat in Jordan’s parliament outside of the quota system - which reserves a rather tiny six seats out of 110 for women.

The Daily Mail has possibly outdone itself in the offensiveness stakes, by inviting a panel of editors from men’s mags GQ and Loaded, and some random other bloke (aka style journalist) to rate the sexiness of women’s lingerie.

In a stunningly predictable example of the double standard, they give the highest ratings for the “virginal”, “mismatched” and generally non-threatening numbers, despite making a living out of selling some very different messages.

Typical excerpt:

The classic image of a suspender set with a push-up bra is what most women imagine gets their chap going. As you’ll see from the results overleaf, though, nothing could be further from the truth. Whether it’s a simple white set-up with a sexy bow, or some cute polka dot pants, the items that score big with our panel - made up of myself, Simon Mills and Alex Bilmes - are those that suggest innocence and fun.

Posted by Jess McCabe on 6 December 2007, at 12:41 AM