Day 7: Smile More

A client tells me how he used to have a best friend whom attempted to rape a female friend of his. It makes him wonder how well he knows his guy friends.

Image of a cartoon girl with glasses and a laptop. The text says Coding Like a Girl. With a speech bubble that reads: But you don't look like a programmer!

A comic with Harley Quinn and Arrow. Harley says: "It's nice to be drugged and wake up hand cuffed. My puddin' and I used to do this every Thursday."

"Nothing makes me angrier than men who try to debate about rape/sexism, and then pull the 'I'm just trying to have a logical debate and be a critical thinker' card enjoy the privilege of being able to talk about rape without no emotional attachment. enjoy the privilege of rape being SO abstract from your life that its just a logical debate for you. some of us aren't so lucky." A post on a survivor's group.

"There is really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard." An image of Arundhati Roy, and this is her quote.

"Aren't smiles so much better than duck face?"

A video of a young woman telling of her repeated sexual assault by her adoptive brothers. They also shot her in the back of the head with a BB gun when she wouldn't engage with them and their friend sexually. Her elder brother raped her. Her message? Never blame yourself. Never give up.

Male actor dresses as woman to experience sexual harassment on the streets of Egypt and is overwhelmed

"When a woman is loved correctly she becomes ten times the woman she was before."

Emma Watson puts up the feminist bookclub on her Goodreads. Gloria Steinem is the first read. Taylor Swift and JK Rowling are invited. The picture of Emma Watson advertising this is her mostly bare back, bright red lipstick, and her leaning forward.

A woman talks about her first time having sex, and the man was violent and hurt her. She doesn't identify it as rape, but remains uncertain where it sits. "There is a difference between hesitating and saying, firmly, no. What is the name for that place? I imagine it to be vast, to be full of women who said okay, who whispered it, or didn’t. I imagine it to be full of shadows, and a difficult place to leave."

A study talks about the "glass cliff" which is where women and men begin with the same amount of ambition but no support or help for women in business means they burn out and stop trying to overcome the "glass ceiling" barriers.

At Crabby Joe's the male servers are wearing pants and the female servers are wearing extremely short skirts.

A friend talks about a D&D game taking place in the Underdark. Which is, I might add, a matriarchy. It's how D&D handles women in charge. And People of Colour.

A friend tells me that a male friend of hers is concerned that his guy friend is getting too close to a radical feminist and it's making all the men in their group nervous because it's like he's been brainwashed. He then went on to tell her that rape statistics are false.

Emma Watson begins a feminist book club to educate herself and others!

A friend posts about Hannibal. A great tv show. A tv show very awful to women. Can't we have both?

Another client tells me a story about seeing an Iranian woman wandering around near the 403 and no one stopped to help the woman. She does, leaving her 13 year old son in the car. The woman was here living with her sister and her brother in law. The brother in law was beating her and sexually abusing her so she ran away. From Richmond Hill. Which was a couple hours walk away. No one had stopped her as she walked, barefoot in October and in pyjamas, as she walked two hours away

A client talks of how her brother in law repeatedly talked over her, a Muslim woman from Pakistan, to tell her that letting in Muslim refugees was down right wrong.

India's Daughter

My client talks about how in the last year nine new executives have been hired at her company. None were women.

Comic book artists pull out of award in protest of an all-male short list

Ladies: "Date a guy who opens a door for you and then slaps your ass as you walk through."

An Uber driver accused to returning to woman's home to rob and sexually assault her

A health drink for a slimmer belly!

For the New Years assaults in Germany, the mayor told women they should've stayed at "arm's length" to avoid being sexually assaulted.

An article teaching people on how to talk to their daughters. How not to talk about their bodies unless it's to teach them how it works. How to compliment them about health or intelligence or creativity not looks. How to treat them like people.

In a conversation about Star Wars and Where's Padme? "Nothing like demonstrating how women fuck up your life quite like Anakin's story."

A poster of Obama it reads: "Fuck the NRA, fuck the Republicans. Fuck you and your fucking guns. You want an assault rifle? Put on a fucking uniform and serve this fucking country. You fucking pussies."

A client talks about how there are only two female managers at her work out of nine. The male coworkers go to coffee together and she rarely gets invited. The other female manager must yell to get her point across, and the male coworkers think she's crazy

Today I am mentally exhausted. Today is day seven. For a full week I've been tracking sexism. It's been a bit of a rough week with some shit from convention planning, because gaming as a hobby is rife with sexism. But overall, not all that bad.

I do feel a need to pull away today. I can feel my mind wanting a break, wanting to just sit down and watch something stupid and not pay attention. But that's not what I said I'd do. So if my feed is a bit quieter today, it's not because there's less out there, it's because I'm a little tired and a little broken.

An artist's Valkyrie picture. She's fully armoured, arms, shoulders, chest, a little wing tiara on her head. Except her left boob is hanging out unarmoured.

Leslie Mann appears to accidentally unzip Dakota Johnson's dress at the PCAs. Huh?

"I'm so sick of political correctness.""Say that without the political correctness."
"I'm tired of not being able to belittle and insult women and minorities."

An article on Kylo Ren loving his grandmother too. They put him in a fancy hat. But it begs the question where is Padme's legacy in all of this?

"Smile more."

The Globe and Mail released an article stating Muslim men must learn to respect women. The Globe was also mentioned in an article last year about sexism in its newsroom due to white male employers.

Tweets responding to IBM's attempt to engage women scientists by asking them to ‪#‎hackahairdryer

Article about Dads being parents and how that doesn't make moms lucky when they actively participate in raising their children.

“Imagine you’re at a party. A guy offers you a drink. You say no. He says ‘Come on, one drink!’ You say ‘no thanks.’ Later, he brings you a soda. ‘I know you said you didn’t want a drink, but I was getting one for myself and you looked thirsty.’ For you to refuse at this point makes you the asshole. He’s just being nice, right? Predators use the social contract and our own good hearts and fear of being rude against us. If you drink the drink, you’re teaching him that it just takes a little persistence on his part to overcome your ‘no.’ If you say ‘Really, I appreciate it, but no thanks’ and put the drink down and walk away from it, you’re the one who looks rude in that moment. But the fact is, you didn’t ask for the drink and you don’t want the drink and you don’t have to drink it just to make some guy feel validated.” —The Art of “No” (Jennifer P.)