Politics

This past week, the news broke that New York City began to instruct its police officers this winter that to make sure they act accordingly to legality of women going topless in public. It’s easy to dismiss this law with a punch line, but the truth is that instructing all of New York’s police force to leave topless women alone is groundbreaking and part of a long running movement lead by women who have fought for topless equality.

Are you a criminal? Let me be specific: have you committed the civil offense of working in the United States without papers? Have you thwarted our nation of laws through heinous acts of unauthorized fruit picking? How about using your degree from UC Berkeley to perform renegade statistical analysis? Are you one of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States?

Today saw not one, but two politicians toss offhand comments about appearances at women involved in politics. One of those men is the chair of a South Carolina county’s Republican Party, which, well, no surprise. But the other is President Barack Obama. Obama! Step it up.

This week, we’re all hoping that the Supreme Court will rule on the side of all that is fair and good and affirm the rights of gay and lesbian people to be married.

But while we’ve got our thumbs on champagne corks, anxiously waiting to celebrate, let’s just take a breath for a minute and recognize that while marriage equality is just major step forward toward equality for same-sex couples, it’s just a step toward equality for all in America. We’ve got to look beyond marriage to the other ways gender, sexuality, and love will still be regulated by the government, even if gays can finally tie the knot.

The North Dakota legislature approved a “personhood” measure for the ballot last week—if the governor signs off on the measure, voters will decide in 2014 if North Dakota should criminalize abortion and shut down the state’s only abortion-providing clinic.

These are the most restrictive laws proposed in the United States, but a slew of lesser restrictions have passed legislatures across the country in recent years.  While they’ll have real, personal impact if enacted, the bills serve another purpose: media stunt.

While I was watching regrettable late-night TV recently, an interview caught my attention: Ultra-conservative Florida Senator Marco Rubio discussing his admiration of the music of Tupac Shakur and NWA.

This isn’t breaking news; Rubio has been openly discussing his love of hip-hop since a December 2012 GQ interview.  To be clear, Rubio says he only knows about Wu Tang from The Dave Chapelle Show, which I am pretty sure is the main reason why Chappelle stopped doing that show in the middle of its third season.

It’s entirely possible that Rubio is just pandering to a younger crowd by proclaiming his love of rap. It’s no secret that the GOP has high hopes that Rubio will be their Barack Obama in 2016.  Obama loves Jay-Z, so maybe Rubio’s banking on dropping Tupac’s name to win youth votes. 

But if Rubio is sincere, it’s ironic that a rising GOP star to profess his love for a music genre that his party put on trial at a Congressional hearing just six years ago. Rubio’s explanation? “I don’t listen to music for the politics of it.”

Supporting survivors of domestic violence should be an easy political issue. And yet! For months, the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act has been derailed by Republican opposition to the bill's plans to expand protections for Native American, LGBT, and immigrant communities. 

This morning, the House finally passed the Violence Against Women Act, including those "controversial" provisions. Here are the 138 Representatives who voted no. 

In our most recent print issue, writer Maya Dusenbery spells out why violence against women is such a crucial issue for the government to address—but why focusing efforts primarily on putting abusers in jail is problematic: 

While ostensibly committed to building a “coordinated community response” to violence against women, the law privileges a pro-criminalization strategy. The original legislation was wrapped in the largest crime bill in U.S. history, and more than half of the initial funding was allocated to law-enforcement efforts. This focus means, for example, that U visas are only available to undocumented survivors who are willing to cooperate with a criminal investigation. Critics of the legislation have argued that relying on the state to protect women from violence can be counterproductive, particularly for poor communities of color. As Angela Davis asked in 2000, “Can a state that is thoroughly infused with racism, male dominance, class-bias, and homophobia, and that constructs itself in and through violence act to minimize violence in the lives of women?”

The National Mall got a new memorial yesterday, if only briefly. As part of One Billion Rising, Baltimore-based feminist group FORCE installed a temporary memorial recognizing survivors of sexual assault. The group greated giant letters out of a statement from a rape survivor and floated the eight-foot-tall words onto the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. 

Read our full interview here with the activists behind the action!

Baltimore feminist group FORCE took the world by surprise last December when they launched a line of fake Victoria's Secret, dropping underwear emblazoned with phrases like "Consent is Sexy" and "Ask First" at Victoria's Secrets around the US and promoting the fake Pink Loves Consent line on the internet. The spoof came off brilliantly, using a well-coordinated "feminist Facebook army" to hijack Victoria Secret's social media and broadcast the a discussion of consent to millions of mainstream shoppers. Last week, I talked with FORCE organizers Rebecca Nagle and Hannah Brancato about what they learned from the Pink Loves Consent campaign, how Facebook and Twitter have censored their spoof, and the details on their next action, a Valentine's Day protest that will install a temporary monument to rape survivors in Washington DC. 

BITCH: What choices did you make while planning Pink Loves Consent that made it so wildly successful? 

HANNAH BRANCATO:  The big decision was that we couldn't sell the underwear. This is a spoof, we're using Victoria's Secret's trademark, so we couldn't legally sell anything. There was all of this intense energy around the project when it first launched but the only thing people could think of doing was buying the underwear. 

REBECCA NAGLE: The first thing they asked was, 'Where can I buy this?" And I think it was powerful to come back and say, "You can't buy it, it's an idea." Instead of sending people to a checkout cart, we're sending people to resources, to saying, "Here's a zine you can make."