What Your Feminists Are Raging About This Week

Hey friends! This week your feminists went in on a whole range of issues, its been an interesting week for feminism.

1. Trump Attended the “Values Voters Summit” which is a super conservative, anti-LGBTQ+ conference that handed out pamphlets called “The Health Hazards of Homosexuality.” He was also quoted with saying he was going to undo the religious oppression in this country and get things “back to the way they used to be.” We found this collectively troubling and I am anxious for what this means for LGBTQ+ folks in the future. link
2. Trump next went on to joke about how Vice President Mike Pence wanted to “hang all the gays.” When discussing how Trump mocks Pence for his extreme religious views he was quoted saying “Don’t ask that guy, he just wants to hang them all!” haha so funny, my life is a joke to our president. It was mentioned in group conversation that this is especially troubling because our president is making jokes about the person who he has trusted to be the one of the most powerful people in the world should anything happen to him. link
3. On a slightly lighter note we discussed the surprising decision of the Boy Scouts to now allow girls to join. The general consensus was that we were unsure of what outcome was to happen because the boy scouts does not have the greatest track record with equality having only allowed trans members in earlier this year and only lifting the ban on gay members in 2015. We hope this leads to better programs for kids nationwide but we shall see. link
4. We briefly discussed Mayim Bialik’s rather disheartening comments on the Harvey Weinstein situation. Her better talking points called out Hollywood for using women as sexual currency. However, she falls short when insinuating that she was not targeted for dressing modestly, not being super skinny, and not having a bunch of plastic surgery. This is some grade A slut shaming, while she does not state it is women’s fault for attracting this kind of attention it does feed into the “perfect victim” stereotype where victims are only super conventionally beautiful women. link
5. Probably the most positive bit of news today was Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for boys to be raised as feminists. He said that men had the power to completely change the culture and that’s why focus should be placed there. link
6. California is the first state to allow people to add third gender to official documentation. Residents can now identify as nonbinary on driver’s licenses, birth certificates, etc. Yay Cali! link
7. In some more positive religious news (we really don’t want to religion bash in shoutout, I realize the first two articles can insinuate that), the Pope has canonized 35 new saints and among them is a Spanish priest who in the 19th and 20th century advocated for the advancement of women and girls in his community. This led to him being nicknamed the “feminist priest.” Gotta love this Pope. link
8. Lastly, we talked about something very personal to my family and that is the rigged election that occurred in Venezuela over the weekend. The Venezuelan government claimed their party gained 17 new seats and the opposing party gained only 2 seats. In actuality the vote had the opposing party gaining 16 new seats but the government would not recognize it. This has led to a resurgence of protests and is essentially a huge cluster. With some encouragement from shoutout’s editor I will be putting out an article on the situation there in full next week. link

Keep an eye out for my regularly scheduled discourse hitting this page later today at 6pm. Until then, stay furious.