By Louise Livesey | 23 February 2009, 17:05

This is a great piece about men’s responses to women talking about their abortion. Makes for interesting and awesome reading.

This piece on Islamic Feminism is also exciting, sadly the only coverage of this I could find in my limited time was from Time magazine - anyone with non-western coverage please let me have links and I’ll put them up.

Penny Red has something interesting on new moves from to force single mothers into work when their child is a year old, yes you read that right, one year old.

And Sociological Images has something interesting about obesity and liklihood of death. Taking a BMI of 23.5-24.9 as “ideal” and alloting death rates at that BMI as 1.0 the table clearly shows that women with a BMI of under 18.5 had 2.03 deaths (i.e. double the “normal) whilst obese women with a BMI of 35-39.9 had 1.49 deaths. Yes you read that right the scale goes 23.5-24.9 = normal, 35-39.9 (i.e. morbidly obese) = 1.5x and under 18.5 = 2x. But it’s the weight that’ll kill you, obviously!

Meanwhile the UN has published their most recent findings of research into trafficking and has found that sexual exploitation accounts for the biggest reason for trafficking of people across borders.

According to the Report, the most common form of human trafficking (79%) is sexual exploitation. The victims of sexual exploitation are predominantly women and girls. Surprisingly, in 30% of the countries which provided information on the gender of traffickers, women make up the largest proportion of traffickers. In some parts of the world, women trafficking is the norm.

The second most common form of human trafficking is forced labour (18%), although this may be a misrepresentation because forced labour is less frequently detected and reported than trafficking for sexual exploitation.

From UNODC

The report is available here.

And Vegan Ideal has something, continuing our PETA need to get a grip series about a stunt in which bloodied cross-dressers will parade under the tagline “Fur is a Drag”. Yep I am now convinced PETAs approach is to insult everyone they possibly can except white, straight men (who they lurve - see the previous one on faux-lesbians).

The “Fur is a Drag” campaign is part of this continuum of violence and oppression against tansgender people. It is a mistake to view the appropriation of the term “drag” as a cute or silly pun. The assumed “joke” is deeply transphobic, and is just as oppressive as any White supremacist, misogynist, or homophobic so-called “joke.” (Of course, PETA does also use White supremacy, misogyny, and homophobia in its campaigns.) In this context, “Fur is a Drag” is akin to PETA having a campaign titled “Fur is Gay.” Obviously, the latter campaign presents being gay as objectionable and, likewise, the existing campaign presents being trans as objectionable.

Vegan Ideal