One night in January after a lot of dancing at a friend’s house party in Brooklyn, a male neighbor and I made our way back to our building less than a mile away. We’d both consumed alcoholic beverages but nothing unusual for twenty-somethings on a Saturday night. My roommate had a new love interest at home with him, so to give him some privacy I went back to the neighbor’s apartment to crash, which I’d done several times before. I felt safe going back there as I’d spent a lot of time with this neighbor in a Will & Grace, Glee-watching, Katy Perry-listening kind of way.

We live in a culture that is more comfortable asking rape victims “why did you let yourself get raped?” than asking their attackers “why did you rape?” After a Toronto cop’s remark seemed to put the responsibility for rape on how a victim dressed, it lit a fuse of anger that has spread around the globe.

Slutwalk. “Because We’ve Had Enough”

It’s coming to Kansas City today, and maybe to your city next.

The word slut is used to dehumanize and blame far too many victims of sexual assault. Well, some women have had enough and are arranging Slut Walks all over the planet.

I wish that headline was in any way hyperbolic. And this comes out of a five-year study, not a quick answer to deflect criticism. This is the formal opinion of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Many are nervous that, without leadership at the top, the reforms DSK attempted at the IMF will wither.

The House plans to vote on its anti-abortion bill, HR 3, this week, which would effectively end all insurance coverage of abortion-related services. The White House has threatened to veto the bill.

The Administration didn’t mention the most egregious part of the bill, though they captured most of it. Because of an outcry earlier in the year, House Republicans changed the language that would alter the definition of rape to only include so-called “forcible rape,” in an effort to limit the rape exemptions in the law where abortions are allowed.

Danielle McGuire, the prizewinning author and assistant professor of history at Wayne State University, has written a beautifully crafted and richly researched testimony of the hidden transcript of the Civil Rights Movement. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power makes a powerful case for re-imagining the Civil Rights Movement in the South through the lens of sexual violence. This path-breaking book spotlights incidents of sexual assault from the early 1940s to the mid 1970s. Rather than remaining secreted, these brutal attacks inspired community protests among African Americans and their white allies. These grassroots struggles of resistance to white supremacy helped initiate the wider Civil Rights Movement that emerged after World War II and which eventually forced the national government to end racial segregation and black disfranchisement. Also, these community-based networks of support provided the infrastructure for the more familiar history of civil rights activities in Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, Jackson, Mississippi, Tallahassee, Florida and other southern cities.

So! H.R.3 supposedly won’t redefine rape anymore, but the fight’s just getting started. We learned last week that the new Congress followed H.R. 3 with H.R. 358, the Protect Life Act, which would redefine “conscience” clauses to allow pregnant women to die if saving them would require harming the fetus.

If you think Democrats are incapable of coordination, let me forward you my email inbox for today. In it, you will find no less than 18 Democratic members of Congress sending the exact same message – in list-building petitions and recaps of multiple press conferences and advisories of additional press conferences and guidance for reporters and press aides – about attacks on women’s health by the House GOP.

On April 11, 2010, private US military contractor DynCorp threw a party at its US-taxpayer funded Kunduz Regional Training Center where its employees train Afghan police. DynCorp’s employees allegedly took drugs and paid young “dancing boys” to entertain them.