Tell Home Depot and Lowe’s to stop selling bee-killing pesticidesBees are essential for one out of three bites of food we eat. But last winter, beekeepers reported losses of 50-70 percent of their hives — the worst year yet since the global bee die-off began!
A growing body of scientific evidence is pointing to neonicotinoids (neonics) as the key factor in this crisis and the European Union has just imposed a two year ban on these toxic pesticides.
These neonics are everywhere — in commercial agriculture, on the shelf of your local garden stores, and in the plants and seeds we buy from nurseries.
Bee part of the solution! Tell Home Depot, Lowe’s and others to stop selling neonics.
The Nu Project’s Nude Photos Tell The Truth About Women’s Bodies
The Nu Project is a no-glamor honest look at beauty and image in our world.
Female nudity isn’t hard to come by in the media, but the bodies we see usually represent a fairly limited scope of sizes and shapes. The Nu Project, a collection of nude photographs shot by Minneapolis photographer Matt Blum, seeks to add some variety to the mix. Blum started The Nu Project in 2005 but said it really took off when his wife, Katy Kessler, became the project’s editor. Blum sees the photos as filling a void. “When I started shooting nudes there was no project like it,” he told The Huffington Post in an email. The things that I had seen either used models with typical model bodies or average people who were made to look extremely unimpressive. I figured there was a way to treat women (of any size/shape) like models and photograph them beautifully, respectfully without a lot of sexual under or overtones. The women photographed are all volunteers, and most of the pictures are taken in the subjects’ homes — where they feel most comfortable. The Nu Project’s website showcases six galleries of nudes, three shot in North America, three in South America. Although Blum told HuffPost that he feels that they have a “good variety of people involved,” he and Kessler acknowledge on The Nu Project website that they’d love for the subjects to be more diverse. “The hardest part for us is that the project is 100 percent volunteer, so I do not see the women until I show up at their door,” Blum writes on the website. “We’re doing our best to encourage all types of women, but we need volunteers of all backgrounds and walks of life to make the project more complete.” Blum said he ultimately hopes that these images inspire the women who see them to feel better about their own bodies. “It’s been really exciting to hear people react to the images,” he told HuffPost. “We get a lot of feedback from women (especially) who have struggled to see themselves as beautiful, and this project has helped them on that path.”
If owning a gun and knowing how to use it worked, the military would be the safest place for a woman. It’s not.
If women covering up their bodies worked, Afghanistan would have a lower rate of sexual assault than Polynesia. It doesn’t.
If not drinking alcohol worked, children would not be raped. They are.
If your advice to a woman to avoid rape is to be the most modestly dressed, soberest and first to go home, you may as well add “so the rapist will choose someone else”.
If your response to hearing a woman has been raped is “she didn’t have to go to that bar/nightclub/party” you are saying that you want bars, nightclubs and parties to have no women in them. Unless you want the women to show up, but wear kaftans and drink orange juice. Good luck selling either of those options to your friends.
Or you could just be honest and say that you don’t want less rape, you want (even) less prosecution of rapists.
When people scoff at the message that we need to teach people not to rape they make the assumption that the lesson goes: “Rape is bad. Don’t do it.” That is not what the lesson looks like. The lesson, once it is adopted, will be that every single person out there, regardless of any defining personal characteristics, is a human being of value, and with a right to make their own decisions about what bodily contact to have with others. There is nothing a person can do that makes them less deserving of that right. Violating any person’s right to control the when, what and who with of their sexual interactions is wrong. Do it and you will be punished, and you will deserve it.
N.B. While not all those who are raped are women, and not all rapists are men, much less rape apologists; rape prevention myths are always targeted at women, and this post reflects this. My language in the final paragraph is very consciously gender-neutral.
Out of every 100 rapes:
- 46 are reported to the police
- 12 rapes will resort in an arrest
- 9 rape cases are prosecuted
- 5 rape cases lead to a felony conviction
- Only 3 rapists will ever spend a day in jail
In a survey of 11-14 year-old boys:
- 51% believed rape was acceptable if a boy spent a lot of money on a girl
- 31% believed rape was acceptable if a girl had past sexual experience
- 65% believed rape were acceptable if a girl and boy had been dating for more than 6 months
- 87% believed rape were acceptable if the woman and man are married
A woman might not even have grown up understanding what rape is…because in a survey of 11-14 year-old girls:
- 41% believed rape was acceptable if a boy spent a lot of money on a girl
- 32% believed rape was acceptable if a girl had past sexual experience
- 47% believed rape were acceptable if a girl and boy had been dating for more than 6 months
- 79% believed rape were acceptable if the woman and man are married
In a survey of college males:
- 35% admit - anonymously - that they would rape under the circumstances that they could get away with it
- 1 in 12 admitted to committing acts defined as rape, but 84% of rapists did not recognize those acts as rape
In yet another survey of college males:
- 43% of college-aged men admitted to using coercive behavior to have sex, including ignoring a woman’s protest, using physical aggression, and forcing intercourse.
- 15% acknowledged they had committed acquaintance rape; 11% acknowledged using physical restraints to force a woman to have sex.
I could go on, but attitudinal surveys and acceptance of rape myths are far more telling than legal statistics.
