VIDA

• Survivors of military sexual assault testified this week in a Senate hearing to advocate for outside review of cases. Among the strongest voices for a chance in policy was that of New York senator Kristen Gillibrand, who told lawyers for the Defense Department, "I appreciate the work you're doing, but it's not enough." [L.A. Times, N.Y. Daily News]

• The Steubenville rape trial continues, with key evidence in the form of damning text messages and, today, testimony from eyewitnesses who took photographs and later erased them. [Huffington Post]

• The dismal 2012 numbers on gender equity in magazine bylines were released by VIDA last week. Flavorwire asked Granta and Tin House, two literary publications where women are published in equal (and sometimes greater) numbers than men, the secret to running a publication that actively courts and publishes female authors. Their answer is the piece's title: "It Isn't Rocket Science." [Flavorwire]

• Meet the new pope, same as the old pope—especially when it comes to LGBT rights. Salon has a roundup of Pope Francis's greatest hits on the subject, and by "hits" we mean "terrible, awful, heartwrenchingly bigoted statements SHUT UP MAN UGGHHH STOP TALKING." [Salon]

• In other pope news, the wags at Mother Jones compiled a handy "Pope Francis vs. Black Francis" chart for all you Pixies fans. [Mother Jones]

• It's Women's History Month, which you know. The Grio name-checks four black women activists you might not know. [The Grio]

• Alternet's Don Hazen, like us, has just about had it with the whole is-feminism-dead question, asking "Why is it that women who clearly need feminism less than most are debating whether the whole notion should get junked?" Why indeed. [AlterNet]

• Martha Stewart doesn't care who likes her—or more to the point, who doesn't. As Ann Friedman argues, that makes her a compelling, if problematic, example to women in business. [The Cut]

• Finally, we know this is a tough crowd when it comes to Lena Dunham, but her answer to Playboy's question about what she would do if she "woke up in the body of a Victoria's Secret model" was pretty damn on point. Also, don't you love how the interviewer used "Victoria's Secret model," like somehow that's just SO MUCH MORE NORMATIVE and male-gazey than, oh, "Playboy model"? [Playboy]

“Who says women don’t write serious nonfiction?” ask the editors at Creative Nonfiction, the largest literary magazine dedicated to publishing exclusively high quality nonfiction prose. The meaty essay section in their winter issue, titled “Female Form,” happens to feature (surprise!) solely women writers. In a fortuitous coincidence, the release of “Female Form” dovetails with the most recent national count of the gender of media-makers, the VIDA count. 

The VIDA count is a staggering annual statistical breakdown showing the rates of publication between women and men in several respected literary outlets. This year, the count reveals that men continue to have 70 percent of bylines in mainstream media. VIDA, a burgeoning organization of women in literary arts, conducted the first count in 2011, hoping to initiate a long overdue conversation about gender discrimination in the publishing world.

“We did not go into this thinking we knew the answer to something and this was going to illustrate it, because this is a complicated issue,” VIDA co-founder, Erin Belieu, told Mother Jones last April. “But you can't deny the starkness of such an incredibly wide discrepancy.”