Feminist Link Round Up 10.24.14

Almost All Female Restaurant Workers Have Experienced Sexual Harassment

A horrifying though sadly unsurprising report released today sheds light on rampant sexual harassment experienced by women in the service industry. The damning report by Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United and Forward Together discovered that 90% of female restaurant workers had experienced some form of sexual harassment from either a customer, co-worker or higher up at their place of employment—and for over half, they were sexually harassed on a weekly basis.

The report, called The Glass Floor: Sexual Harassment in the Restaurant Industry, surveyed nearly 700 current or recent employees of restaurants and conducted focus groups in major US cities including New York and Washington DC. Through this research, it was revealed that women were twice as likely to experience at-work sexual harassment in states where servers are paid the $2.13 Federal minimum for tipped workers and that both men and women were likelier to experience harassment in states that used that minimum.

Perhaps even more disturbing is that women who were surveyed were often compelled by management to sexualize their actions but feared reprisal if they reported any sexual harassment from management or customers. Understandably, women who went through these experience “reported deterioration in their emotional well-being, including increased depression and anxiety” and were one and a half times more likely to “live with harassing behaviors” if they’d already worked in a tipping environment.

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Strange Empire

STRANGE EMPIRE is a Western whose heroes are women. With most of their men gone, and those who remain battling for control, the women struggle to survive, to find their independence, and to build a life in which to thrive and raise families. As the stories of Janestown’s citizens unfold we see the clash between a power-hungry father and son and the deep prejudices among races, but also the start of something akin to community in this Wild West. Western stories take civilization as a goal; they begin in blood, and end in the morality of Main Street. Starring Cara Gee as Kat Loving, Melissa Farman as Dr. Rebecca Blithely and Tattiawna Jones as Isabelle Slotter.
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 10 Responses to the phrase ‘Man Up’

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 31% of queer women feel safe, secure, and involved in their community

(excerpt)

It is important to look below the surface of street harassment to see why it might influence queer women’s community involvement and sense of safety and security. Some incidents of homophobic violence against members of queer communities begin with street harassment (here) but research suggests that gay men who are victims of hate crime are often targeted when they are in gay spaces, such as gay-borhoods and near gay bars. Those who attack gay men often premeditate the attack and operate in groups to outnumber a lone gay man or a gay male couple.

However, frequently when lesbians are victims of anti-gay harassment and violence, they are attacked in everyday spaces such as parking lots and college campuses (here and here). Perpetrators who target lesbians are most often men and alone; however, the lesbian is often not alone but is with another woman or more than one other woman. Typically the attacker is a man but he has not gone to a gay area to find his lesbian victim/s and he hasn’t premeditated his verbal, physical or sexual assault. Rather, the harasser has chosen to act in that moment, likely as he interprets visual cues that for him identify the women as queer. In other words, violence in public space against queer women surfaces in the moment – as does street harassment.

Feminists, queer scholars, and activists have long argued that street harassment and violence against gay men and queer and straight women is about policing gender and sexuality, and that the “police” are almost always heterosexual men. But the pattern here, the difference in the characteristics associated with attacks on gay men versus attacks on lesbians, suggests that harassment and violence against queer women (and indeed all women and queer individuals) is linked to rape culture where the male gaze conveys and embodies domination, entitlement and ownership.

Through street harassment lesbians are being disciplined for (among other things) having the temerity to place themselves out of the harasser’s figurative sexual reach, a violation of heterosexual gender norms. White male supremacy and rape culture intersect and dictate that queer women of color have even less permission than queer white women to occupy public (i.e. male) space and that men are even more entitled to discipline them for attempting to place their bodies outside the reach of heterosexual men. In fact, as Dorothy Roberts and others have aptly illustrated, disciplining the bodies of women of color has a long unbroken history in the U.S.

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Conservative Iranian newspapers silent on acid attacks

Outrage over a recent series of acid attacks against women in Isafahan, Iran has led to government and reformist newspapers criticizing the attacks, but conservative outlets have little to nothing to say.

Newspapers associated with conservatives in Iran have remained oddly silent or limited in their coverage of the attacks in Isfahan. Iran’s leading conservative newspaper, Kayhan, associated with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s office, has ran little to no coverage on the incidents, finally dedicating its Tuesday, October 22, 2014 frontpage with a headline that read: “Acidpashi in the face of hijab is used to create a wave of anti-revolutionary sentiment.” Kayhan wrote, “Contrary to the lying reports of foreign media and their domestic supporters, the victims of these incidents are women with proper hijab, and some of them from martyr families.”

According to Shahram Rafizadeh’s newspaper report in Radio Farda, Kayhan has accused reformist newspapers like Iran, Arman, Asrar, Khabar Online, Ebtekar, and Isfahan Ziba of publishing news related to the attacks in order to destroy the image of the “believers” and “supporters” of the Islamic regime.

Coverage of the news in conservative newspapers have largely been reactionary to other media, rather than focused on covering the news, or why these assaults have been occurring. Much of the blame for the attacks has been placed on conservative elements inside Iran, especially since lawmakers have proposed a bill that would give vigilantes legal protection to enforce hijab. In a report in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, an Iranian woman explains, “[Hard-liners] have been spreading hatred against women, therefore many believe they are behind the attacks.” Many concerns against the lack of inaction by authorities reflects the conservative media’s limited attention to covering who are behind the attacks, and what is causing them.

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Feminist Link Round Up 10.24.14
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