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The Everyday Sexism Project
This is so cool.
What is the Everyday Sexism Project?: Laura Bates created a place to record incidents of everyday sexism, which has quickly attracted thousands of stories from women all over the world. She explains how the project works and why she set it up.
(excerpt)
The stories I have collected reveal that sexism is endemic - socially, professionally and publicly - with stories ranging from abusive comments about maternity leave, driving ability and 'macho' sportswomen, to horrific accounts of victim-blaming and physical assault. With the entries all in one place, it's very easy to draw correlations and connections between these experiences, and it becomes impossible to separate the atmosphere created by the more 'minor' instances from those that escalate towards sexual violence and domestic assault.
(excerpt)
When I protested to male friends I was invariably told to calm down or stop overreacting. When I heard sexist comments on the radio or the television, they were laughed off or not mentioned at all. When I looked at the shelves in the newsagents and saw rows and rows of women's breasts and naked torsos, there was no acknowledgement of the strange inequality and the loud message about the value of women that they presented. The story about the women's Olympic beach volleyball team being allowed to wear extra clothes in cold weather seemed to raise no eyebrows when it featured on the front page of The Times - which called the event "more famous for its bikinis and pert bottoms than the actual sport".
I began to realise that the problem couldn't be tackled because so few were acknowledging it. So I set out, not to solve the problem outright, but to prove that it existed, and to make sure that nobody would tell us we couldn't talk about it anymore.
I expected some resistance; questioning, antagonism even. But what I wasn't prepared for was the vitriolic backlash of hate mail, threats and misogynistic abuse that poured into my mailbox for days on end. The backlash and stigma against reporting experiences of sexism in the real world was magnified and amplified by the strange kaleidoscope of the internet, until it crystallised in my inbox into graphic accounts of domestic abuse, horrifying misogynistic rants and threat after threat of rape and death. Ironically, of course, the abuse only served to prove how desperately the project needed to exist. I defy anyone who says sexism is no longer a big issue for the modern woman to read any one of the hundreds of messages of hate I received in those first few weeks. But I am still here, and the project remains live, because I stand with the thousands of women who have been brave enough, and angry enough, to share their stories with me in the hope that the world will listen.
(excerpt)
The stories I have collected reveal that sexism is endemic - socially, professionally and publicly - with stories ranging from abusive comments about maternity leave, driving ability and 'macho' sportswomen, to horrific accounts of victim-blaming and physical assault. With the entries all in one place, it's very easy to draw correlations and connections between these experiences, and it becomes impossible to separate the atmosphere created by the more 'minor' instances from those that escalate towards sexual violence and domestic assault.
(excerpt)
When I protested to male friends I was invariably told to calm down or stop overreacting. When I heard sexist comments on the radio or the television, they were laughed off or not mentioned at all. When I looked at the shelves in the newsagents and saw rows and rows of women's breasts and naked torsos, there was no acknowledgement of the strange inequality and the loud message about the value of women that they presented. The story about the women's Olympic beach volleyball team being allowed to wear extra clothes in cold weather seemed to raise no eyebrows when it featured on the front page of The Times - which called the event "more famous for its bikinis and pert bottoms than the actual sport".
I began to realise that the problem couldn't be tackled because so few were acknowledging it. So I set out, not to solve the problem outright, but to prove that it existed, and to make sure that nobody would tell us we couldn't talk about it anymore.
I expected some resistance; questioning, antagonism even. But what I wasn't prepared for was the vitriolic backlash of hate mail, threats and misogynistic abuse that poured into my mailbox for days on end. The backlash and stigma against reporting experiences of sexism in the real world was magnified and amplified by the strange kaleidoscope of the internet, until it crystallised in my inbox into graphic accounts of domestic abuse, horrifying misogynistic rants and threat after threat of rape and death. Ironically, of course, the abuse only served to prove how desperately the project needed to exist. I defy anyone who says sexism is no longer a big issue for the modern woman to read any one of the hundreds of messages of hate I received in those first few weeks. But I am still here, and the project remains live, because I stand with the thousands of women who have been brave enough, and angry enough, to share their stories with me in the hope that the world will listen.
Link to the excerpted article above: http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/2012/08/everyday_sexism
Link to the site: http://www.everydaysexism.com/
There are literally thousands of entries and it's only been up a short time.
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