Local News
Gov. Youngkin wants to open the flow of information- about periods Petula Dvorak February 16, 2023
Democratic state lawmakers were trying to pass a legislation that was created in hopes to protect women menstrual calendars from authorities. The governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkins administration claims that they are all about personal freedom, yet they are “bringing the government back into your bathroom and bedroom”. This information is a breach of privacy of women’s menstrual data, and Glenn Youngkin is not putting a stop to it by not passing it. Virginia’s State senator Barbara Favola wanted to try and get ahead as soon as Youngkin proposed criminalizing abortions after 15 weeks. Barbara created a defense bill, which protected women from any type of search warrants related to menstrual cycle happenings in the Virginia legislature and was blocked by Youngkin’s administration.
To better understand how invasive this truly is, in the case that a woman decides to get an illegal abortion, the data allows the government to figure out and prove it by accessing the information from the menstrual data from calendars and apps. As well as having the ability to go through their text messages and search history. It genuinely feels as if we are going backward in history and women have yet another helpful tool taken away from us.
National News
The CDC comes out with a statistic every two years on teens’ feelings of depression and state of desperation. The 2021 survey which just came out around two weeks ago shows an alarming spike in the state of desperation and anxiety for teen girls. This article and survey shows that mental health is increasingly becoming more of a problem. For teen girls the percentage of them feeling sad or hopeless was 57% over a 20 percent increase in the past 10 years. Teen girls are becoming more likely to commit suicide and are experiencing more violence and sexual assault.
I felt like this article was important to bring up during the newsroom because although mental health awareness has become very relevant, there is still so much more that needs to be done. Especially for young women, their mental health is being affected by social media and things occurring in the world affecting women like Roe v Wade being overturned. One of the questions I brought up during the newsroom was if colleges were doing well enough to provide mental health resources and the overall consensus no. Although it is hard for a college to provide for so many people they can put in more effort like providing unlimited free therapy. Overall we all agreed that in order for the depression rates for girls and boys to decrease are for changes to be made in and out of schools.
Global News
For the first time in 10 years, Tate Britain is revealing a complete rehang of its collections. Beginning May 23rd, 2023, visitors will be able to discover some of the greatest works that Tate Britain has to offer. But more importantly, female artists will be given prominent positions in this rehang. This is exciting representation for women, as half of the contemporary pieces on display will be created by female artists. Collections will range from the 17th century to present day.
While this is exciting news, I came to question why it’s taken so long to reach this step of inclusivity. I’m especially emphasizing this because Tate Britain is including female artists all the way from the 17th century, so where was this representation (at the minimum) even 10 years ago, in the previous rehang? As I brought this question up in our newsroom discussion, we considered how British art history has been very male dominated, as well as their own country’s history too. Although we can conjure up many reasons for the delayed inclusivity, something we can agree upon is that giving women a prominent position in this rehang is inspiring and important representation for women and young girls everywhere.
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