The !feminism@beehaw.org community has long since become the largest Lemmy community. In acknowledgement of that, I have decided in consultation with @Gaywallet@beehaw.org to lock this community and redirect.

Personally, I am male and only took on the mod post to make sure Lemmy had a feminism community in the early days of Lemmy, so I'm happy to cede the title to a more vibrant community. If someone wishes to attempt to revive the lemmy.ml community, please get in contact.

Edit: In response to feedback, see:

• [Crossposting encouraged to !feminism@beehaw.org](https://lemmy.ml/post/16759775)
• Call for moderators

The Palestinian brewery is now run by a woman, Madis Khoury, which adds an extra layer of complexity. “Being in a male-dominated country, an Arab country, and under occupation, it’s four or five times harder than anywhere else,” she says.

The Haitian people are once again facing imperialist interference in their fate. The island in the Caribbean is experiencing growing violence and systematic violations, control over territories by armed groups, repression, and subjection of the people’s interests to transnational capital. Living conditions in urban and rural areas are becoming dramatically worse. The access to food and the circulation of peasant production has been deeply affected. This is precisely why they are at the center of the popular peasant feminist resistance. Amid this situation, the UN, which has been historically responsible for military interventions that have led to increasingly profound social and political problems, is once again working in line with US imperialism. On the video below, Islanda Micherline, of La Via Campesina Haiti, denounces the role of countries in the Global North that, through the UN Core Group for Haiti, have been operating the new attempt to intervene in the country. Grassroots organizations and movements demand the 2021 Montana Accord, which expresses the unity of the Haitian people toward a peaceful political transition guided by people’s sovereignty. In rural and urban areas, Islanda argues, Haitian women propose economic strategies for this transition, in the sense of building agroecology, solidarity economy, and food sovereignty, goals that can only be achieved through the peoples’ self-determination and a people’s government. From across the Americas, women continue to stand in internationalist, anti-imperialist solidarity for a dignified, sovereign Haiti free from occupation. Islanda Micherline addresses the challenges facing Haitian peasant women and their strategies for self-determination and people’s sovereignty in the video below:

Women From Haiti Facing New Imperialist Interference

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2192594

has been doing these casual roundtable conversations lately and they fucking rule

Archived: https://archive.is/2CUnZ

Hours before the ruling, a group representing the woman, whose fetus received a fatal diagnosis, said she was leaving Texas for an abortion.

TIJUANA, Mexico — Just over a decade ago, when Crystal Pérez Lira needed an abortion, she had to leave Mexico. The procedure was illegal in her home state of Baja California and so deeply stigmatized that even Pérez Lira supported the procedure only for those who were raped. Until she unexpectedly got pregnant.

She traveled to the U.S. for help, walking alone across the border from Tijuana to San Diego, first for a health check and a compulsory ultrasound, and then back for a second appointment, when she was given pills to induce an abortion. She returned to Mexico, where she went through the procedure at a friend’s house.

Today, the cross-border help moves in the opposite direction. Pérez Lira is part of a network of activists across Mexico who provide advice, emotional support, and free medications to those seeking abortion — including, increasingly, people living in U.S. states where abortion is sharply restricted. These volunteer groups, known as “companion networks,” have been quietly sending abortion pills across the border, often to vulnerable people who lack funds or immigration papers, and training volunteers in the U.S. to establish their own companion networks.

These activists operate outside the health care system, working to create abortion access even in places where doctors face prosecution for assisting with the procedure.

“They’re being very underground,” Pérez Lira said, explaining that she couldn’t put a STAT reporter in touch with the U.S.-based networks. “It’s very, very secretive.”

Bloodys Red Tijuana, the group Pérez Lira founded in 2016, a few years after her own abortion, received its first request for abortion pills from someone in the U.S. in the summer of 2019. Three years later, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision eliminated constitutional protections for abortion, just as Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized the procedure.

Over the past two years, Pérez Lira said, the group has supported around 60 people living north of the border, distributing not just pills but also information on how to safely manage an abortion. “We’re migrating the way we’re working,” she said. “We’re migrating that mission into the U.S.”

read more: https://www.statnews.com/2023/12/07/mexican-abortion-activist-networks-provides-abortion-pills-united-states/

Three Muslim women share their stories of removing their hijabs, despite facing fierce opposition.

Article without paywall: https://archive.ph/ZA7x9

Nearly three years ago, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal effectively ended legal abortion in the country. Since then, the Polish government has vigorously repressed the nation’s reproductive rights movement and ramped up surveillance of women who are suspected of terminating their pregnancies. Authorities have violently dispersed demonstrations, threatened activists with prison time and ordered doctors to record all pregnancies in a new national database.

Even before Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer, Poland’s draconian crackdown, which was spearheaded by the governing right-wing Law and Justice party, should have been alarming to American supporters of abortion rights. It was always possible that some aspects of what has happened there could happen here.

Now there are reports that laboratory tests to detect abortion drugs have not only been created in Poland but are, in rare cases, also being used there to investigate the outcomes of pregnancies. These tests are not yet known to be in use anywhere else in the world. But Americans would be wise to plan for the possibility that the technology could one day be adopted on this side of the Atlantic and used by law enforcement to suss out whether women have taken abortion pills — which are now banned or restricted in more than two dozen states.

Women in both Poland and the United States have increasingly relied on informal networks for access to mifepristone and misoprostol, the drugs typically used in a medication abortion. In both countries, women can easily find information online and via telephone hotlines about how to use them to safely self-manage an abortion. That information often includes tips for protecting yourself from being targeted by law enforcement, as has already happened to some women who took abortion pills or were suspected of doing so.

For years, reproductive rights advocates have assured American women that when these medications are taken by mouth, a doctor cannot determine whether they were taken to induce an early abortion because the symptoms are indistinguishable from a miscarriage and because the drugs don’t show up on toxicology screens.

But Polish scientists claim they’ve devised laboratory methods to detect both mifepristone and misoprostol in biological specimens, and a spokeswoman for the regional prosecutor’s office in Wroclaw confirmed that these tests have been used in Poland to investigate pregnancy outcomes.

In a paper published last October in the journal Molecules, a group of researchers at Wroclaw Medical University’s Department of Forensic Medicine and the Institute of Toxicology Research in Poland described a technique for detecting misoprostol acid, a substance produced by the metabolism of misoprostol, in tissue taken from the placenta and the fetal liver. Weeks later, they published a second paper describing the development of a “rapid, sensitive and reliable method” to detect the other abortion drug, mifepristone, in maternal blood. The studies were conducted as part of a state-funded research project started in 2022.

The researchers, one of whom identifies as pro-choice, wrote that they developed these tests in part out of concern that the availability of abortion pills on the black market poses a public health threat. But it is difficult to see how this form of testing has medical or public health value, given the well-documented safety and efficacy of abortion pills. In effect, it seems strictly punitive — to harass and intimidate people who self-manage their abortions and to collect evidence about anyone who helped them get pills. Under Polish law, women cannot be prosecuted for taking abortion pills, but you can go to jail for helping someone else get them.

Last March, a court in Warsaw found a human rights activist guilty of just that. Justyna Wydrzynska, a co-founder of the Abortion Dream Team, a Polish abortion rights group, was sentenced to eight months of community service for providing abortion pills to a woman in an abusive relationship.

That conviction, the first of its kind in Europe, brings to mind the situation in El Salvador, where abortion is banned under all circumstances, including when the pregnant person’s life or health is in danger, and in cases of rape. Women who suffer miscarriages and stillbirths in El Salvador are sometimes accused of homicide and sentenced to years or even decades in prison.

Now that Roe has been overturned, U.S. abortion-rights advocates are bracing for cases like these to become increasingly common in America. A small but growing group of abortion “abolitionists” are calling for women who get abortions to be charged with murder and criminally punished — even put to death. Some Republican lawmakers are listening; this year alone, more than half a dozen states have introduced legislation that would classify abortion as homicide, a strategy experts believe could gain greater support should others fail. One such existing effort: a serious legal challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s nearly 25-year-old approval of mifepristone that threatens access to the drug across the country. (In mid-August, a federal appeals court panel upheld mifepristone’s approval but with significant restrictions on patients’ access to the drug. The ruling cannot go into effect until the Supreme Court weighs in.)

Amid these concerns, reproductive rights activists need to prepare for the possibility that testing for abortion drugs could happen here, too. Even the threat of such a test could have dire consequences for reproductive health, deepening distrust of the medical establishment and discouraging people from seeking care. Should prosecutors in Poland inspire copycats in American states, no health care provider should enable or support such a move.

The testing methods developed at Wroclaw employ what’s called tandem mass spectrometry, a sophisticated analytical technique regarded as the gold standard for the detection and quantification of chemical compounds in biological material. For decades, the significant cost of mass spectrometers and the technical knowledge needed to maintain and service the machines confined them to highly specialized laboratories. But as the technology has evolved, experts say, it’s become easier to use and far more accessible.

Almost every toxicology lab that supports a coroner’s office or medical examiner’s office in the United States “has several of these instruments, specifically for the purpose of finding drugs and drug metabolites in biological tissues of all kinds,” said Dr. Glen P. Jackson, a professor of forensic and investigative science at West Virginia University. “There are also many labs that work alongside emergency wards to identify poisons and toxins and drugs used in overdoses.” It would be “really quite easy,” he said, for any of them to develop methods similar to those described in these papers.

“There’s the potential for these tools to do a lot of good,” said Nicholas Manicke, a professor of chemistry and forensic science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Dr. Manicke’s research focuses on making mass spectrometry simpler and easier to use for things like cancer research, organ transplantation, screening for explosives at airports and identifying contaminants in food. “But given the political climate, they’re also ripe for use by opponents of abortion.”

Drug testing in clinical settings in the United States is largely unregulated, and the decision-making at individual facilities is often opaque. Michele Goodwin, a law professor at Georgetown University, has documented the dangers of doctors and nurses having discretionary power to interpret state statutes and report their patients to law enforcement. Ms. Goodwin writes in her book, “Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood,” how a visit to a doctor’s office or hospital can double as a criminal investigation, leading to arrest and prosecution under a wide range of laws that purport to protect fetuses.

While most such laws preclude bringing charges against the pregnant woman, overzealous prosecutors have nevertheless done so.

Testing for abortion drugs is just the latest effort by the Polish government to enforce a stringent law. It’s a perversion of science for political ends and a possible preview of what awaits us in America’s post-Roe future.

20 years after Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous ‘hot-or-not’ website, developers have learned absolutely nothing.

Two decades after Mark Zuckerberg created FaceMash, the infamously sexist “hot-or-not” website that served as the precursor to Facebook, a developer has had the bright idea to do the exact same thing—this time with all the women generated by AI.

A new website, smashorpass.ai, feels like a sick parody of Zuckerberg’s shameful beginnings, but is apparently meant as an earnest experiment exploring the capabilities of AI image recommendation. Just like Zuck’s original site, “Smash or Pass” shows images of women and invites users to rate them with a positive or negative response. The only difference is that all the “women” are actually AI generated images, and exhibit many of the telltale signs of the sexist bias common to image-based machine learning systems.

For starters, nearly all of the imaginary women generated by the site have cartoonishly large breasts, and their faces have an unsettling airbrushed quality that is typical of AI generators. Their figures are also often heavily outlined and contrasted with backgrounds, another dead giveaway for AI generated images depicting people. Even more disturbing, some of the images omit faces altogether, depicting headless feminine figures with enormous breasts.

According to the site’s novice developer, Emmet Halm, the site is a “generative AI party game” that requires “no further explanation.”

“You know what to do, boys,” Halm tweeted while introducing the project, inviting men to objectify the female form in a fun and novel way. His tweet debuting the website garnered over 500 retweets and 1,500 likes. In a follow-up tweet, he claimed that the top 3 images on the site all had roughly 16,000 "smashes."

Understandably, AI experts find the project simultaneously horrifying and hilariously tonedeaf. “It's truly disheartening that in the 20 years since FaceMash was launched, technology is still seen as an acceptable way to objectify and gather clicks,” Sasha Luccioni, an AI researcher at HuggingFace, told Motherboard after using the Smash or Pass website.

One developer, Rona Wang, responded by making a nearly identical parody website that rates men—not based on their looks, but how likely they are to be dangerous predators of women.

The sexist and racist biases exhibited by AI systems have been thoroughly documented, but that hasn’t stopped many AI developers from deploying apps that inherit those biases in new and often harmful ways. In some cases, developers espousing “anti-woke” beliefs have treated bias against women and marginalized people as a feature of AI, and not a bug. With virtually no evidence, some conservative outrage jockeys have claimed the opposite—that AI is “woke” because popular tools like ChatGPT won’t say racial slurs.

The developer’s initial claims about the site’s capabilities seem to be exaggerated. In a series of tweets, Halm claimed the project is a “recursively self-improving” image recommendation engine that uses the data collected from your clicks to determine your preference in AI-generated women. But the currently-existing version of the site doesn’t actually self-improve—using the site long enough results in many of the images repeating, and Halm says the recursive capability will be added in a future version.

It's also not gone over well with everyone on social media. One blue-check user responded, "Bro wtf is this. The concept of finetuning your aesthetic GenAI image tool is cool but you definitely could have done it with literally any other category to prove the concept, like food, interior design, landscapes, etc."

Halm could not be reached for comment.

“I’m in the arena trying stuff,” Halm tweeted. “Some ideas just need to exist.”

Luccioni points out that no, they absolutely do not.

“There are huge amounts of nonhuman data that is available and this tool could have been used to generate images of cars, kittens, or plants—and yet we see machine-generated images of women with big breasts,” said Luccioni. “As a woman working in the male-dominated field of AI, this really saddens me.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20230624214433/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/lynn-paltrow-pregnancy-justice-interview.html

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/620581

Similar to Andrea Dworkin's work.

"Mens' rights" my ASS! lol

Women's rights rule!

Link: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-state-our-unions/202208/the-rise-lonely-single-men

Men face sexism too!

You might have heard people dismissing misandry as unimportant because 'there's no systemic discrimination against men' or the famous saying "Misandry irritates. Misogyny kills"

Occasionally, you might hear that there is systemic misogyny, which may occasionally backfire against men occasionally.

But is this true? Let's look at the facts

The Law

According to a very indepth review by Sonja Starr, she deduced that Men get 63% longer sentences for the same crime. While it is true that men are more likely to commit crimes, it doesn't explain the gender disparity, which is alot longer than racial disparity, which means even an African American woman would get a shorter sentence than a white man.

Men's troubles don't start there. Men are more likely to be stopped by the police, and even when women are stopped, we are less likely to be arrested.

Women are also less likely to be killed by the police. And overally, men are 90% of those in prison, 98% of death row inmates, and and 98.8% of those executed.

Now when we hear that African Americans are unjustly being killed by police at higher rates than white people, we rightly protest and accuse the police of discrimination. We also say that if African-Americans commit more crimes than whites it's due to systemic discrimination against them, but if men receive much harsher sentences than women for the same crime and sentencing history, isn't it systemic discrimination.

So, why does this discrimination exist? It's in part due to the 'women are wonderful effect'. Some have argued this is only due to women following traditional gender roles, but even when women are not, we are still seen as wonderful

Violence against women is seen as almost universally evil especially Western nations. According to research done by Richard B Felson, people see violence against women worse than violence against men, especially if the perp is a woman.

Men are discriminated against even when they are the victims, As criminals get harsher punishments for killing women than for killing men.

Mental Health

It's a well known fact that men commit suicide more than women in every country in the world. But what is behind this rate? People argue that since women attempt suicide at higher rates than men, it proves that women are the ones in need of help not men. But men have a higher rate of suicidal intent than women. It seems that many women could be making a suicidal gesture rather than actually wanting to commit suicide.

As a woman, I used to be suicidal but I was able to benefit from therapy, which is what most want.

Some also say that men choose more lethal methods, but this is also not indicative of men's suicide rate because even when men choose the same methods, they still die more than women.

Some say it is due to toxic masculinity, but even that has problems. First of all, if women were more oppressed than men, why would they commit suicide at a higher rate? Secondly, 91% of men who committed suicide did seek help before doing it

So, what is the reason? Well, suicide prevention programs work much better for girls than for boys.

This study shows that men are dropping out of therapy prematurely because therapy was created with women in mind.

To summarize, if men all over the world commit suicide more than women, even when using the same methods, and men drop out of therapy because it doesnt suit their needs, than isn't it systemic discrimination?

Physical Health

Now, everyone knows that women live longer than men in almost every country on Earth. But leave alone the fact that men are more likely to commit suicide, die at work (more on than later), die during a conflict (more on than later), drown, die from an injury, and die from child abuse, let's look at mens health. Men are more likely to die from cancer, heart attacks, and even coronavirus

Despite all this, women's health receives FOUR TIMES as much funding as men's health

Hate crimes

Almost everyone agrees that gay men are oppressed to some degree. But gay men suffer hate crimes more often than gay women do. Other feminists say this is because lesbians are seen as 'sexier' than gay men. But even transwomen are more likely to be victims of hate crimes than trans men. The key here is that even though trans women are women, transphobes dont consider them women, they consider them 'men in dresses' and thus deserving of violence. While transmen usually say that people generally treat them with kid gloves when they find out they were AFAB (assigned female at birth). Bisexual men endure more discrimination than bisexual women.

72 countries have laws against homosexuality, but only about 40 have laws against female homosexuality So in 27 countries, it's banned for men but not for women.

So if men are more likely to be victims of hate crimes, male homosexuality is punished more than female homosexuals, while trans women are being targeted because they are seen as men pretending to be women, doesn't it mean men are systemically discriminated against?

Work

You've probably heard that women make less money than men, and that is an example of discrimination, but the truth is that women choose more fulfilling and safer jobs than men. We also choose jobs closer to home, so we commute less, and we take less overtime and work shorter hours. Here is a video explaining it all.

According to this research, men work almost twice as long as women in a week, do more work in a week even when unpaid labor is considered.

According to this study, men are much more unhappy at work than women

Men are more than 10 times more likely to die at work than women

Boys are more likely to be put in child labor than girls, and according to this study, the work they do is very dangerous and harmful.

So, how is all of this systemic? Well, there is a general cultural and religious duty of men to provide for women. In Christianity as well as Islam, men are told (and sometimes harshly condemned for not) to provide for women, and our children. This leads to men choosing higher paying but more dangerous, less emotionally fulfilling, and farther away jobs so they can provide for women.

However, even though men are in a way 'punished' for choosing such careers by dying more on the job and being more unhappy at work, women aren't really 'punished' for our careers because we still control most of consumer spending.

Which means that many men work punishing hours at a job they dislike and STILL benefit less than women.

This doesn't even take into account all the concessions offices make for women, like breastfeeding rooms, worker maternal leave, etc

Military

Currently, about 60 countries have mandatory drafts for males but only 9 have mandatory drafts for women. In some countries, women serve for a shorter time, like in Israel, women service two years while men serve for 2.5 years.

In some cases, men and boys will be targeted in a military operation or massacre.

​

Retirement rates

Several countries still have a lower retirement age for women

Homes and homelessness

Men are more likely to be homeless in almost every country on Earth.