Tag Archives: rape culture

Artist Sneaks Out at Night to Change the World

Debbie says:

These super-fabulous street art posters have been showing up in Philadelphia and New York. The artist is Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, who also has a Tumblr called Stop Telling Women to Smile.

 

Fazlalizadeh lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant (a famously low-income, mostly African-American and Hispanic) neighborhood in New York, where she got sick of being constantly cat-called, so she took action.

She also gives artist talks and uses those, like her art and her web presence, to get people to think about the meaning behind, and the effect of, street harassment. The posters prompt discussion, including responses written on the posters themselves, for example (as seen at the first link above) “a cocky woman who blows a guy off isn’t that attractive, no matter how good you look,” and “Relax!”

So, she’s touching a nerve.

Who knows? Maybe in a year or two, Fazlalizadeh will not have to “dodge cops in the cover of darkness” to get her posters into the world. I’d like to see them as public service announcements in bus shelters and train platforms in every English-speaking city in the world.

One Billion Rising: February 14, 2013

Laurie and Debbie say:

ONE IN THREE WOMEN ON THE PLANET WILL BE RAPED OR BEATEN IN HER LIFETIME.

ONE BILLION WOMEN VIOLATED IS AN ATROCITY

ONE BILLION WOMEN DANCING IS A REVOLUTION

One billion women are rising tomorrow, all over the world.

On V-Day’s 15th Anniversary, 14 February 2013, we are inviting ONE BILLION women and those who love them to WALK OUT, DANCE, RISE UP, and DEMAND an end to this violence. ONE BILLION RISING will move the earth, activating women and men across every country. V-Day wants the world to see our collective strength, our numbers, our solidarity across borders.

What does ONE BILLION look like? On 14 February 2013, it will look like a REVOLUTION.

ONE BILLION RISING IS:

A global strike
An invitation to dance
A call to men and women to refuse to participate in the status quo until rape and rape culture ends
An act of solidarity, demonstrating to women the commonality of their struggles and their power in numbers
A refusal to accept violence against women and girls as a given
A new time and a new way of being

V-Day (linked above) is a 15-year-old global movement to end violence against women. The movement was started by Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues.

This year, the V-Day folks are pulling out all the stops, organizing globally. Will we see one billion women rising in the streets? Or one billion people? Probably not, but we’re going to see a lot of people! There’s already livestream video from Manila on the site.

Looking at the map on the One Billion Rising site, and clicking around the world map, we find events in:

El Paso (La Palma Islas Canarias), Quebec, Sinaloa, Poitiers (Vienne), Boduthakurufuaanu Magu, Male’ (Henveiru), New South Wales, and literally hundreds more. (If you’re curious–we were–Henveiru is in the Maldive Islands.)

In our own Bay Area, there are 79 events, including flash mobs, performances, rituals, fundraisers, and more.

What will it take–really–to end violence against women? It will take belief in the possibility, willingness to organize, passion, commitment, and millions of people. And One Billion Rising is harnessing all of these things.

Here are some excerpts from Ensler’s poem/essay “Over It.” Read the whole thing.

Over It

I am over rape.

I am over rape culture, rape mentality, rape pages on Facebook.

I am over the thousands of people who signed those pages with their real names without shame

I am over people calling it freedom of speech and justifying it as a joke.

I am over people not understanding that rape is not a joke and I am over being told I don’t have a sense of humor, and women don’t have a sense of humor, when most women I know (and I know a lot) are really fucking funny. We just don’t think that uninvited penises up our anus, or our vagina is a laugh riot.

I am over how long it seems to take anyone to ever respond to rape.

I am over the hundreds of thousands of women in Congo still waiting for the rapes to end and the rapists to be held accountable.

I am over the thousands of women in Bosnia, Burma, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, South Africa, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Afghanistan, Libya, you name a place, still waiting for justice.

I am over a woman being gang raped and murdered on a bus in Delhi or gang raped and videoed in Steubenville Ohio. …

No women, no future, duh.