In a way, the controversies surrounding Ashley Judd’s puffy face has done immense good. Not only have our media exposed themselves as sexist scavengers that perpetuate fascist beauty standards in evaluating women’s worth in our society, but this so-called news update has allowed for an emergence of a much needed dialogue on a much undermined feminist issue. And who better than Ashley Judd herself to confront the pernicious impacts of yellow journalism that comprise mass media selling points today?

Judd raises several critical questions that inform such innocent curiosities of bystanders on puffy faces. Such insulated have we become within ourselves against attacks on our collective human intelligence that we have ended up evaluating each other based on how we measure up against a strict yardstick of beauty that generates advertising money. Such depraved are we today as never before in terms of recognizing our unique selves that we crave to adulate a physical form that requires validation from outside before it can appeal to our inner selves.

Through her powerful, evocative and emancipatory writing in true feministic traditions, Ashley Judd also reminds us of our vulnerabilities of constantly being judged while we accept the assaults silently. If it requires courage, conviction and a public platform for a celebrity of her stature to register a protest, how ridiculously difficult it must be for young children and teenagers today who are constantly subjected to reminders of their less than ideal body image?

Judd compels us to interrogate our shoddy privileges when we denigrate the less ideal bodies and how it becomes more pathetic as women are asked to “better watch out” in fear of the philandering husband. She forces us to reexamine traditional components of patriarchal setups that conveniently blame the men exclusively and she reminds how grim the situation really is today when most women are falling for the sexist spells. That, she was first criticized by women for her looks is no mere coincidence. In fact, like gullible and willful agents of patriarchy – a system mirrored after dominant male perspectives – women unquestioningly look upto and emulate the male priorities and adapt to them as their own. Especially in the entertainment industry, where the male producers amass the wealth, it is the female performers that feel emancipated through approved looks. Ashley Judd minces no words, makes her personal political, and reflects upon her career of approvals that has received significant jolts along the way whenever she has failed to satisfy the conditions fulfilling beauty criterion.

She writes, “this abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women…..In fact, it’s about boys and men, too, who are equally objectified and ridiculed, according to heteronormative definitions of masculinity that deny the full and dynamic range of their personhood.”

Entire article can be found on The Daily Beast.

Travis Waldron of Think Progress comments on Gov. Scott Walker’s latest decision that will jeopardize the interests of wage discrimination victims.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) quietly repealed his state’s equal pay law last week, a decision that will make it harder for victims of wage discrimination to sue for lost earnings and back wages. The law was enacted primarily to address the massive pay gap that exists between male and female workers, which is even bigger in Wisconsin than in other states.

Repealing the law was a no-brainer for state Sen. Glenn Grothman (R), who led the effort because of his belief that pay discrimination is a myth driven by liberal women’s groups. Ignoring multiple studies showing that the pay gap exists, Grothman blamed females for prioritizing childrearing and homemaking instead of money, saying, “Money is more important for men,” The Daily Beast reports:

Whatever gaps exist, he insists, stem from women’s decision to prioritize childrearing over their careers. “Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he says. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.” [...]
Grothman doesn’t accept these studies. When I ran the numbers by him, he replied, “The American Association of University Women is a pretty liberal group.” Nor, he argued, does its conclusion take into account other factors, like “goals in life. You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious. To attribute everything to a so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.”

Among Grothman’s inaccuracies is the idea that only males “expect to be a breadwinner someday.” In two-thirds of American families, women are either primary or co-breadwinners, and yet they still earn less than their male counterparts in all 50 states.

In 2011, the Wisconsin GOP carried out an extensive war on workers that led to recall efforts for state representatives, senators, and Walker himself. In 2012, Grothman and his colleagues have expanded that war to one on women, meaning a group of workers that was already struggling to keep pace with their male counterparts is only going to fall further behind.

by Katie Matlack

Women are the more active gender on online social networks, and are the healthcare decisionmakers in most families, too. Taken together, these two facts help explain why women–moms in particular–often are responsible for using the web to bring powerful stories from the grassroots level to the world, effecting real change in healthcare.

To learn more about the topic I spoke with Deb Levine, a pioneer when it comes to using the web as a tool for social change related to health information access and technology. She founded the award-winning online sexual health Q&A site Go Ask Alice, and recently won an award from the White House for her team’s design of an app used to help prevent dating violence at colleges and universities. Levine, a mother of two, observed that being a mom “informs all of [her] work and writing” and is “an overarching influence” on her.

“Women who are mothers are writing about sensitive issues,” she continued. “[They] are the people who, in bringing health issues to the forefront, are pushing healthcare reform and access while also bringing attention to important issues like maternal mortality.”

Below, I’ll discuss six moms doing important work to improve healthcare and the tools available in health for the wellness of themselves and their families–and ultimately, of all of us.

Deb Levine – Trustworthy health information access for young adults

Levine built what’s known by many as the first major health Q&A site, Go Ask Alice; it was also named by Stanford University as the most accurate reproductive health info site on the Internet. The site’s success–it receives over 1.5 million hits per month–illustrates what Levine’s work showed us: that “topics considered to be shameful and embarrassing like sex are best discussed behind a screen–computer screen then, mobile phone and PDA today.” Today Levine directs a nonprofit, Internet Sexuality Information Services, and is organizing next month’s conference, Sex::Tech, on new media, youth, and sexual health.

Elita Kalma – Spreading information about benefits of breastfeeding to women of color

With the birth of her first child, Kalma wisely started her helpful, delightful and assertive blog Blactating after discovering that few voices online advocating for breastfeeding were from women of color. She tells her own experience about breastfeeding, thus acting as a critical role model among women of color debating nursing. The Surgeon General reports that breastfeeding rates are about half as great among black at birth as compared to white children, with negative health repercussions since breastfeeding can counter child obesity as well as a range of other health issues, so here Kalma’s advocacy can act to spur online conversation, dispel misinformation, and raise awareness to help benefit readers and readers who are women of color in particular.

Jodi Jacobson – Advocacy for public health and reproductive and sexual health & justice

Visit RH Reality Check (RH stands for reproductive health) to get an idea of Jacobson’s impact. She’s the Editor-in-Chief there and writes regularly about news events that stand to impact reproductive health rights. For example, Jacobson was partially responsible for publicizing and drumming up outcry against the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s policy change in February that, were it not reversed, would have denied preventative health services to thousands of women. In addition to providing information directly to the masses on this site, Jacobsen frequently weighs in as an expert cited in mainstream publications including the Lancet and The Economist. She also founded and led the Center for Health and Gender Equity, an internationally-influential organization that produces cutting-edge research on international policies and programs.

Robin Strongin – Elimination of “gatekeepers” to drive disruptive change in the health sphere

The name of the blog Strongin created sums it up: Disruptive Women in Health Care. The blog’s been around since 2008 and serves as a platform for “provocative ideas, thoughts, and solutions in health.” Strongin realized that the health sphere needed input and direction from some outsiders in order to advance the pace of change. Today bloggers post on her site about underreported issues such as the surprising shortage of primary care physicians or the need for better incentives for mobile health in the U.S. Thus, the blog serves to amplify the voices of its contributors through its coverage in mainstream media outlets such as CBS.

Penelope Trunk – Creation of dialogue around miscarriage and working women’s health issues

Trunk writes a popular blog about “the intersection between work and life” and regularly posts Tweets shared on her site as well. When she inadvertently created an uproar by tweeting about her own miscarriage, however, her influence on society’s acceptance and understanding of health issues was made clear, too. Major outlets such as ABC, CNN and AOL covered the reactions to the tweet, serving to shed light on the misplaced shame that sometimes complicates understanding and support of health issues.

Mary Brune – Connecting moms to information about toxic environmental risks

Brune’s work highlights important information that impacts infant health as well as environmental health conditions that touch us all. Her site, MOMS–which stands for “Making Our Milk Safe”–was founded to bring mothers together to collaborate for a healthier and safer environment for their children. It publicizes risks and protection measures on toxics, and has been featured in a PBS special on toxic toys.

(Katie Matlack writes about health IT topics ranging from medical billing software reviews to social media for doctors and health advocates, to electronic health record adoption, as a blogger for Software Advice, an Austin-based startup.)

A new report from the National Women’s Law Center reveals that health insurance companies are charging women an extra billion dollars annually. Why? Straight up gender discrimination, of course. The report finds a widespread practice of for-profit health insurers charging women more than men for the identical coverage. and states are doing very little to stop the thievery. In the states that don’t ban health insurance gender discrimination, 92% of the best-selling plans charge women more than men. President Obama’s Affordable Care Act would ban this practice nationally – saving women a billion dollars a year. Too bad for women that Republicans are working as hard as they can to repeal the law, commonly called Obamacare. Is the war against women affecting you yet?

92% of best-selling insurance plans gender rate
- By Common Dreams staff
According to a report from the non-profit National Women’s Law Center, the practice of health insurance companies charging women more than men for the same coverage is rampant, and costs women one billion dollars a year.
The report, Turning to Fairness: Insurance discrimination against women today and the Affordable Care Act (pdf), states that although insurance companies are aware of this discrimination, they have not taken steps to eliminate the widespread practice.
Some states have banned the practice, the group reports, but it won’t end nationally until the full enactment of the Affordable Care Act in 2014.
From the report:
Gender rating, the practice of charging women different premiums than men, results in significantly higher rates charged to women throughout the country. In states that have not banned the practice, the vast majority, 92%, of best-selling plans gender rate, for example, charging 40-year-old women more than 40-year-old men for coverage. Only 3% of these plans cover maternity services.? 
Based on an average of currently advertised premiums and the most recent data on the number of women in the individual health insurance market, the practice of gender rating costs women approximately $1 billion a year.? 
Even with maternity coverage excluded, nearly a third of plans examined charge 25- and 40-year-old women at least 30% more than men for the same coverage and in some cases, the difference is far greater. For example, one company charged 25-year-old women 85% more than men for the same coverage, again excluding maternity coverage altogether. These differences result in women paying significantly more for health insurance every year than their male counterparts. For example, one plan in South Dakota charges a 40-year-old woman $1252.80 more a year than a 40-year-old man for the same coverage.? 
The Affordable Care Act applies nationally and eliminates gender rating in the individual market, requires all plans on the individual market to provide maternity coverage, and prohibits sex discrimination in health plans from insurance companies that receive federal funds or are conducted by the federal government.

Jack Tuckner is the featured expert in this incisive Lawyers.com analysis of pregnancy discrimination at the workplace.

Written by Ada Kulesza for Lawyers.com

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has found a sharp increase in pregnancy discrimination complaints over the past 10 years. Women complained of violations that ranged from getting fired during pregnancy or immediately after, to being assigned lower-paying positions because of their condition.
• In Pennsylvania, a chiropractor notified her employer when she found out she was pregnant. She was hospitalized for nearly two weeks with severe morning sickness that nearly led to dehydration. The company fired the mother-to-be and terminated her health care within days of her notice, and hired a replacement. She’s suing under the EEOC for an undisclosed amount, and the company counter-sued her for $50,000, claiming that she left her job and neglected to fulfill her contract obligations. 
• In another case, a judge ordered a Wisconsin medical staffing company to pay $148,000 to a woman, Roxy Leger, who was fired when she took maternity leave following the birth of her son. The settlement resulted from a default judgment, when the company failed to retain an attorney after a court order. According to the EEOC, the company owner “referred to Leger’s pregnancy as a joke; insisted that maternity leave should last no more than a couple of days; suggested that Leger’s pre-natal appointments were a ruse for additional time off or for money; and gave Leger an offensive diagram of a machine which would allow Leger to return from her maternity leave sooner … HCS terminated Leger’s employment and health insurance while she was still in the hospital recovering from a Cesarean section … Leger learned of her termination days later by certified mail,” reports the human resources company Workforce.
• A part-time UPS employee needed to avoid lifting more than 20 pounds during her pregnancy. “Given that UPS had a policy of giving light duty to various other employees who were physically unable to do their usual job,” she assumed the company would accommodate her temporary condition, writes Emily Martin, Vice President of the Women’s Law Center. Instead, they forced her to take unpaid maternity leave, and she lost her medical coverage “months prior to the birth of her child.” She wound up losing her pregnancy discrimination case.
 
Labor Pains

“I’m a businessman. I understand what it’s like to have a pain in the butt employee,” says Jack Tuckner, an attorney specializing in women’s rights and father of two daughters. “Pick a master, you can’t pick two. You have a corporate master. It’s so competitive, with ‘unemployed need not apply’ and jobs leaving the country. The fact is, you’re pregnant, and you’re going to be compromised.”
Tuckner says sex, pregnancy and disability constitute the “Holy Trinity” of discrimination. And he says where sexual harassment and gender bias have leveled off in recent years, pregnancy discrimination is on the rise. Especially because employers deliberately deceive women about their rights to maternity leave.
“You have an employee who’s out of the game for three months, and they aren’t necessarily looking at you as a human being who’s looking for compassion – you’re at home watching HBO!”
He says lying has become more brazen to cheat women out of their lawful rights, which are paltry compared to other developed countries where women get paid maternity leave, such as Germany and the Netherlands. Even a corporation that sells products to women, with mostly female employees, lies to their employees, using the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to get them to resign, so they cannot demand maternity leave or accommodation. “Those calls don’t stop coming in,” the attorney says. It’s especially easy to dupe lower-income women who have less education – women who are more likely to be single mothers, who need the employment more desperately.
If they fire the pregnant woman, it would constitute a violation of the FMLA, so they’ll coax a resignation instead. “Pregnancy is a disability, legally. If you have medical challenges, it’s deserving of a reasonable accommodation,” Tuckner says. A woman on maternity leave will be “out of the game,” and companies see her “as damaged goods.”
The attorney says a few questions will tell a woman if she might have a pregnancy discrimination case. Tuckner says, “You said, ‘Hello employer, I’m pregnant, I need to know what my status is.’ Now, the terms and conditions of my employment with this company, have they changed? Have they been degraded? Have they been altered as a result of my status? After you notified them, or they noticed your pregnancy. If something about my pregnancy is causing a change in my work status that I feel uncomfortable about, it’s the first sign of (discrimination).”
Women can file a complaint with the EEOC, and can seek a consultation with a good women’s rights lawyer. You can find more information and steps you can take to protect yourself here.

Little is known about the Abortion Provider Appreciation Day. March 10 is observed to celebrate abortion providers because it is essential to recognize that Crisis Pregnancy Centers are fake “clinics” driven by anti-abortion agenda. They often have no clinical staff, spread lies, guilt-trip women and enormously delay and complicate women’s ability to access abortion.

New York City today witnessed a protest and march against sites of women’s oppression. The march started from the St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 5th Avenue because the Catholic Church’s approach to women, gender, science and sexuality is a Dark Ages disaster! The Pope has condemned condoms (causing millions of HIV/AIDS deaths). The Church condemns homosexuality and insists that “divorce is a sin” (contributing to women staying in abusive marriages). Recently, Catholic Bishops urged “non-compliance with new regulations requiring health insurance to cover birth control!

Registering the protest at St. Patrick's Cathedral

The March to Times Square was aimed at protesting the objectification of women. Women’s near naked and rail-thin bodies are used to sell everything from clothes to cars to “American culture” to the entire world. Protesters also targeted the US Military Recruiting Center because US military’s quasi-official reliance on brothels as a “perk” to make soldiers and the role of military forces in trafficking women and girls and the epidemic of rape, harassment and violence against female soldiers are core issues that needs addressing.

International Women’s Day celebrations in New York also witnessed a march to and protest strip clubs. American men spend an estimated $15 billion a year on strip clubs, as compared to $4 billion on baseball. Strip clubs have always objectified and degraded women. But as women have entered – and fought for increasing respect in – the public sphere, strip clubs have become an enclave for sexism and male entitlement towards women’s bodies. Further, strip clubs prey upon the desperation, abuse and addiction of many women, including trafficked women.

As one of the organizers, Sunsara Taylor from Stop Patriarchy points out, “Our protest is not symbolic. It is a beginning. It is a declaration. From now, until we win the full liberation of women, this war on women will be resisted with conscience, anger, imagination, massive mobilization, and relentless determination to turn the tide.”

Media Coordinator for this report:
Saswat Pattanayak – spattanayak@womensrightsny.com

Kathryn Pereda was fired because her employer said she did not qualify for FMLA leave. She sued and the court found on her behalf.

Appellate judges noted that neither they nor apparently any other circuit court had considered this issue. They had dodged the question in a ruling involving an employee who wanted leave before she was eligible. But believing that FMLA actually requires employees to give their employers as much notice as possible of their impending need for leave, they ruled for Perry on her interference claim and sent the retaliation claim back to the district court for reconsideration.

The intent of the law was to set up protection for pregnant women though employers continue to use it to instead fire them. Or worse, tell them they have to quit further aggravating their situation.

Brief Summary -
Appellant Kathryn Pereda (“Pereda”) appealed the district court’s dismissal of  her complaint alleging violation of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (“FMLA”), 29 U.S.C. § 2601, et seq., by Appellee Brookdale Senior Living Communities, Inc. (“Brookdale”).  The district court held that because Pereda was not an “eligible employee” at the time she was terminated, she could not bring her claims under the FMLA.  The Eleventh Circuit reversed and remanded, holding Pereda stated sufficient facts to establish prima facie claims for both FMLA interference and retaliation.

Extended Summary –
Pereda filed suit against her employer, Brookdale, alleging claims for interference (Count I) and retaliation (Count II) under the FMLA.  Her complaint asserted that Brookdale interfered with her FMLA rights by denying her benefits to which she was entitled, and by terminating her for attempting to exercise those rights.  Brookdale moved to dismiss for failure to state a claim under Rule 12(b)(6) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.  The district court dismissed Pereda’s complaint, reasoning that Brookdale could not have interfered with Pereda’s FMLA rights, because she was not entitled to FMLA leave at the time that she requested it.  The district court also held that since Pereda was not eligible for FMLA leave, she could not have engaged in protected activity; thus, Brookdale could not have retaliated against her.  Pereda appealed, presenting the Eleventh Circuit with an issue of first impression.

After examining the various elements of the FMLA regulatory scheme, the Eleventh Circuit reversed and remanded.  With respect to Pereda’s interference claim, the court held that it must construe Pereda as “eligible” for FMLA protection.  In so holding, the court noted that because the FMLA requires notice in advance of future leave, employees are protected from interference prior to the occurrence of a triggering event, such as the birth of a child; otherwise, “a loophole is created whereby an employer has total freedom to terminate an employee before she can ever become eligible.”  The court further held that Pereda alleged a valid cause of action for retaliation under the FMLA, because a pre-eligible discussion of post-eligible FMLA leave is protected activity.

By Saswat Pattanayak

International Women’s Day is possibly the most progressive annual observation in human history. It is a celebration that is deeply rooted in women’s rights movement, as the foremost catalyst in diversifying Marxist applications, as the primary precursor to the greatest peoples’ revolution of 1917, and as the epic reminder of the most visible inequality in our world today.

More importantly, International Women’s Day (IWD) also marks the first organized anti-war movement in recorded history.

IWD started as the culmination of Russian women’s pacifist stance against the First World War. The very first peace movement led by (Russian) women in 1913 began to make impacts on this important day and spread to several European countries. Subsequently, the four-day women’s strike against the Czar’s militarism and demand for “Bread and Peace” resulted in abdication of the Czar, and the provisional government granting women the right to vote for the first time. And this historic occasion, the last Sunday of February 1917 in Russia (March 8 on Gregorian Calendar) has since been celebrated as the International Women’s Day.

Owing to Soviet Union’s contributions to women’s movements and progressive workers movements world over, March 8 was observed first by several communist countries and subsequently by most of the world. Due to resistance towards the communist bloc, and also owing to disenfranchised women in the western society, March 8 has never really been adopted with enthusiasm in much of the capitalist world, but ignoring such a milestone has never been really possible.

Tremendous pressure on United Nations to recognize such a special day exclusively to celebrate working women of the world finally resulted in the day being thus designated, only in 1975. March 8 used to be observed as the national holiday of only the erstwhile Soviet Union. Today, IWD is an official holiday in Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, China (for women only), Cuba, Georgia, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Madagascar (for women only), Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Nepal (for women only), Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zambia.

Predictably enough, most countries even today which enthusiastically observe IWD are either communist nations or formerly were members of the communist bloc. However in the western world, feminists have also joined voices with their comrades abroad to formulate IWD’s agendas. On International Women’s Day in 1970, the Berkeley Women’s Liberation Front circulated a pamphlet “Vietnamese Women: Three Portraits” to stand in solidarity with the communist women of Vietnam. The pamphlet asked “What does the Vietnamese war have to do with women’s liberation?” It is an important question considering many western white feminists were either being rejected as racists or irrelevant by women of color in the United States. In the true spirit of an International Women’s Day as envisaged by revolutionary feminists associated with Bolshevik Revolution, the Berkeley front replied:

“Everything! Women in the movement here are talking about the essential right of people to live full and meaningful lives, demanding an end to the way women, throughout history, have been objectified and dehumanized. How then can we not recognize these same claims that are being made not only by the oppressed in our own country, but by those who are oppressed by this country abroad?”

Ruth Rosen in “The World Split Open” mentions that although IWD used to be celebrated only in the communist countries, on International Women’s Day in 1969, about fifty women marched through Berkeley. On March 8, 1970, thirty other towns and cities of America celebrated the day. By the end of the seventies, nearly all schools and cities in the United States commemorated it.

Philip Foner in “Women and the American Labor Movement” describes how the lesser known history of this communist celebration is, in fact, deeply rooted in the labor movement of the United States as well. This is possibly the biggest coincidence that could have cemented the friendship between working peoples of the USA and the USSR, had the western history textbooks and institutional censorships not prevented generations of people from realizing the common causes between women world over. If March 8, 1917 was the day when Russian women started their revolution to acquire right to vote, it was a historic coincidence that on March 8, 1908, women workers in the needle trades had led a massive demonstration in New York demanding democratic unionism. 15,000 women marched through New York City to demand for shorter hours, better pay and voting rights. Such was their impact that, only two years later, on March 8, 2010, German communist Clara Zetkin moved a resolution to honor these American working women and demanded that March 8 be dedicated to fighting for equal rights for all women in all countries.

Coalitions of Labor Union Women in America also found resonance on March 8. In 1975, more than a hundred women unionists from over 55 international AFL-CIO unions, the UAW, and the Teamsters’ Union urged CLUW chapters to participate in observances on March 8, aimed at combating unemployment and to deal with “faltering economy”. Inspired by socialist experiments abroad, women unionists demanded “jobs for all” on this day.

International Women’s Day is losing its relevance due to the anticommunist culture that refuses to acknowledge the role, class conscious women have historically played. On the contrary, with the gradual demise of labor movements in this country, and with growing capitalistic takeover in much of the remaining socialist societies, women are increasingly being silenced via mass media coverages and their demands for unique rights remain at the mercy of handfuls of powerful legislators.

This is a day that is not only historically relevant to understand how March 8 could have very well united women from America and Soviet Union in common cause, but it is also a magnificent reminder of what lies ahead :: the pressing need to recognize unique civil and human rights of women. It is not just a day to celebrate women, but more importantly, a day to recognize tremendous struggles and resistance registered thus far by women’s movements worldwide.

By standing up to Rush Limbaugh’s slur, Sandra Fluke shows how sex positivity is recharging feminism.

By Emily Bazelon for Slate

Sandra Fluke has pointed out that Rush Limbaugh tried to silence her when he called her a slut and a prostitute last week. But the oldest, hoariest trick for shutting women up didn’t work this time. Bolstered by her experience as an activist and a pitch-perfect call of support from President Obama, Fluke soldiered on in her efforts to persuade Georgetown University to include contraception in its package of health care coverage. She’s 30, not 14, and in her sober and smart TV appearances, Fluke is doing more than most of us ever will to take the sting out of slut shaming. Her forceful presence is the reason for Limbaugh’s apology over the weekend, utterly lame and inadequate as it was. How can he possibly claim that he didn’t mean to attack Fluke personally after hammering away at her for three days, even crazily suggesting that women who use birth control should post sex tapes online “so we can all watch.” May the advertisers who are running from Limbaugh, today joined by AOL, stay far far away.

Reclaiming the word slut is also the aim of the SlutWalks, the protest movement that started last spring in Canada and spread to more than 70 cities worldwide. Taking angry inspiration from a Toronto police officer who said the best way for women to prevent being raped is to “avoid dressing like sluts,” the women joining in SlutWalks have marched in all manner of bras, bodices, and other scanty dress. They won both enthusiastic applause and ambivalence from the feminist blogosphere. SlutWalks, and the broader reclamation projection they and Fluke stand for, represent a cultural shift that puts women’s sexual agency front and center rather than modestly cloaking it. Could that change also be the key to reforming rape law for the modern era?

That’s the thesis of Deborah Tuerkheimer, a law professor at DePaul University who is one of the first in the academy to digest the SlutWalk phenomenon. In a new article, Tuerkheimer argues that the “rise of sex-positivity,” as she calls it, is “the most significant feminist initiative in decades.” What’s distinctive about this reclamation is that women are insisting both on sex without rape, and on sexuality without judgment. And that insistence, Tuerkheimer points out, directly challenges traditional rape law.

In the protest movement of my own college days, Take Back the Night, women marched to make it safe to walk alone in the dark. The primary concern was stranger rape and physical safety. The SlutWalks conception is about acquaintance rape or date rape—the category of sexual assault that accounts for 90 percent of the whole. When women (or men) accuse people they know of rape, it’s far trickier for police and prosecutors to address, because the legality of the encounter turns on consent rather than force. Traditionally, rape law focuses on the latter. It sounds retrograde, I know, but as Tuerkheimer reminds us, in a majority of states, “a woman’s non-consent alone is thus insufficient to establish rape.” This makes it very hard to win convictions in the he said/she said realm of date rape. And it also means that a judge or jury can deem a woman who is totally passive—because she is asleep or drugged, for example—to not have been raped, even if she said she was.

Rape law also still treats certain kinds of sexual conduct as unacceptable for women, by exempting it from the rule that places a woman’s sexual history outside the bounds of evidence that can be admitted at a rape trial. Rape shield laws prevent defendants accused of sexual assault from putting a woman’s entire past on trial to discredit her. But courts still allow in this evidence if the judge thinks it shows a pattern of behavior that’s in some way distinctive. In many cases, it’s deviance that’s deemed to make a woman’s history distinctive, allowing the court to give the jury the chance to conclude that a particular’s woman’s claim of rape is less legitimate. “Women whose pasts involve consensual sex of a disapproved kind are presumed to be unrapeable,” Tuerkheimer writes. “Most vexing are acts of prostitution, group sex, and sadomasochism.”

The women of SlutWalks, of course, reject all of this. They think women, not old-fashioned judgments rendered by the state, should define what sex they want and what sex they outlaw. In this feminist roar Tuerkheimer sees a way to shift the rape paradigm once and for all. She wants judges to stop treating certain women as not rapeable based on the kind of sex they’ve consented to in the past. And she wants a new crime of acquaintance rape that topples the rule that it’s only rape, legally speaking, if there’s force involved. On this front, there’s progress in the new definition for collecting local rape statistics announced by the Department of Justice in January. DoJ now defines rape as “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus,” that occurs “without the consent of the victim.”

Tuerkheimer sees the wider feminist rebellion against slut shaming as crucial to forcing more changes along these lines from courts and legislators. Feminist consciousness, she says, could “enable a legal shift that would not otherwise be possible.” I’m not in the habit of imagining that feminists have such power, but in this season of uproar over Limbaugh, why not? Tuerkheimer urges the SlutWalkers to start talking to the law professors and lawyers, and vice versa. It takes a law professor to say that, of course, but maybe Tuerkheimer has pointed out a virtue of the muscular feminism that proudly rejects slut shaming that feminists themselves have so far missed.

Sandra Fluke plays a role here, too. By making the case that women need insurance coverage that includes birth control—to protect their health in some cases, and in others, yes, simply to have sex—she is reminding us that of course this is part of who we are. We don’t have to modestly avert our eyes from that reality or keep quiet about it, either. That’s what President Obama understood when he told Fluke her parents should be proud of her. Feminists have plenty to be proud of Fluke for, too. For standing up to Limbaugh, for sure, but also for helping to make the revolt against slut shaming as mainstream as she is.

The great USA we all know and love was built after World War II, as we grew away into prosperity, aided by strong democratic labor unions that spawned the steady growth of the middle class, which drove the economic engine of all things American. Today, unions are on life support, and our American middle class way of life is dying, as our manufacturing and labor force is outsourced to Asia for shareholder profit. We stand together or we fall alone. Occupy something in your life today.

Richard D. Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit for New York Times –
FROM the 1940s to the 1970s, organized labor helped build a middle-class democracy in the United States. The postwar period was as successful as it was because of unions, which helped enact progressive social legislation from the Civil Rights Act to Medicare. Since then, union representation of American workers has fallen, in tandem with the percentage of income going to the middle class. Broadly shared prosperity has been replaced by winner-take-all plutocracy.

Corporations will tell you that the American labor movement has declined so significantly — to around 7 percent of the private-sector work force today, from 35 percent of the private sector in the mid-1950s — because unions are obsolete in a global economy, where American workers have to compete against low-wage nonunion workers in other countries. But many vibrant industrial democracies, including Germany, have strong unions despite facing the same pressures from globalization.

Other skeptics suggest that because laws now exist providing for worker safety and overtime pay, American employees no longer feel the need to join unions. But polling has shown that a majority of nonunion workers would like to join a union if they could.

In fact, the greatest impediment to unions is weak and anachronistic labor laws. It’s time to add the right to organize a labor union, without employer discrimination, to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, because that right is as fundamental as freedom from discrimination in employment and education. This would enshrine what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed in 1961 at an A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention: “The two most dynamic and cohesive liberal forces in the country are the labor movement and the Negro freedom movement. Together, we can be architects of democracy.”

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that “everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.” The First Amendment has been read to protect freedom of association, and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act recognized the “right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations,” but in reality, the opportunity to organize is a right without a remedy.

Firing someone for trying to organize a union is technically illegal under the 1935 act, but there are powerful incentives for corporations to violate this right, in part because the penalties — mitigated back pay after extended hearings — are so weak.

It is noteworthy that American workers in the airline and railway industries, which are governed not by the 1935 law but by a stronger statute, the Railway Labor Act, have much higher rates of unionization.

Past efforts to strengthen labor laws over four decades have gotten bogged down: Congress cannot pass reforms until labor’s political clout increases, but that won’t happen without labor law reform.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, has much stronger penalties and procedures than labor laws. Under our proposal, complaints about wrongful terminations for union organizing could still go through the National Labor Relations Board, which has expertise in this field. But the board would employ the procedures currently used by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which provide that after 180 days, a plaintiff can move his or her case from the administrative agency to federal court. There, plaintiffs alleging that they were unfairly dismissed for trying to organize could sue for compensatory and punitive damages and lawyers’ fees, have the opportunity to engage in pretrial legal discovery and have access to a jury — none of which are available under current law.

Our proposal would make disciplining or firing an employee “on the basis of seeking union membership” illegal just as it now is on the basis of race, color, sex, religion and national origin. It would expand the fundamental right of association encapsulated in the First Amendment and apply it to the private workplace just as the rights of equality articulated in the 14th Amendment have been so applied.

The labor and civil rights movements have shared values (advancing human dignity), shared interests (people of color are disproportionately working-class), shared historic enemies (the Jim Crow South was also a bastion of right-to-work laws) and shared tactics (sit-ins, strikes and other forms of nonviolent protest). King, it should be remembered, was gunned down in Memphis in 1968, where he was supporting striking black sanitation workers who marched carrying posters with the message “I Am a Man.” Conceiving of labor organizing as a civil right, moreover, would recast the complexity of labor law reform in clear moral terms.

Some might argue that the Civil Rights Act should be limited to discrimination based on immutable characteristics like race or national origin, not acts of volition. But the act already protects against religious discrimination. Some local civil rights statutes even cover marital status, family responsibilities, matriculation, political affiliation, source of income, or place of residence or business.

Should organizing at work for “mutual aid and protection” not also be covered?

While there are many factors that help explain why the nation has progressed on King’s vision for civil rights while it has moved backward on his goal of economic equality, among the most important is the substantial difference between the strength of our laws on civil rights and labor. It is time to write protections for labor into the Civil Rights Act itself.