Many public employees in Wisconsin emitted a sigh of relief today when Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi struck down Republican Governor Scott Walker’s much-contested proposal to strip public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights.
Body shame is being forced upon women with a pernicious and overwhelmingly toxic media that uses unrealistic images and messages of beauty and body, and that overemphasizes the role of beauty and body in a woman’s life. Systematically women are trained to believe that we are worth less if we do not look “perfect,” and when in turn we acknowledge it, we are given a message that is almost equally insidious: it is our fault. It’s not.
Obstetric fistula is a preventable injury during childbirth that can cause a lifetime of incontinence, extreme social isolation and even human rights violations for women if left untreated. Today an estimated two million women, primarily in developing countries, are living with obstetric fistula (it is more rare within industrialized nations because of access to better medical care).
What is it about royalty, and about princesses in particular? Long after one would think that monarchy holds any meaning to a child growing up today, the dream of being a princess is still being sold, successfully, to girls. And lovely Kate Middleton just gave the princess industry a major boost.
Women’s reproductive health care advocates can rest easy for the moment, as Congress has passed a resolution to continue funding the federal government for the rest of the fiscal year that does not include such onerous anti-woman provisions as the re-imposition of the Global Gag Rule.
