
While the past weeks have fostered a stronger collective awareness for women’s rights than I’ve seen in my lifetime, thanks to campaigns like #YesAllWomen, apparently not everyone has received the memo that you’re not supposed to gang-rape people. Or slut-shame them.A group of star athletes allegedly raped a classmate at their prom party. The three were arrested for sexual battery too, but they have yet to spend a single evening in jail. And in order to slut-shame a woman, two little fuckwits who worked at the University of Cincinnati Medical Centre posted a woman’s STI test results online.
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Not Nearly Enough Women Running In Ontario Election“Women in Toronto Politics” and “Elect Women Ontario” have tallied up the number of women in Toronto ridings running in this week’s provincial election, and despite two of the premier candidates being female, it’s not looking good overall.“Of the declared candidates for the four major parties, 29.5 percent of candidates are women,” Women in Toronto Politics reports. The UN states that the critical mass needed for equitable participation of women stands at 30 per cent. (If it’s meant to be “equitable,” I’m not sure why it’s set at a little over a quarter instead of at a full half but that’s as good as women can dare to ask for, I guess).Given the likelihood of each woman winning her riding, I highly doubt that we’ll land anywhere near equitable representation amongst the city’s ridings. It doesn’t mean meeting the target is impossible, though: provincially, a record 145 women are on the ballot province-wide, which constitutes 34 percent of overall candidates. Happily, some are saying we might wind up with another record number of female MPPs. At dissolution, female MPPs made up 29 percent of Ontario’s legislative assembly.Any progress is good progress, but I have to say, Canada as a whole should be doing much better. Out of all Canadian provinces and territories, as of April 2014, only the Yukon and British Columbia met the already-low United Nations target for fair and equal representation. My own home province, New Brunswick, came in at an embarrassing 16 percent.Federally, we’re not doing so hot, either. Women occupy 25 percent of seats in the House of Commons, and that’s a record high. That’s simply not good enough, and more parties need to endorse female candidates. Maybe if they did, there would be more childcare available, better and more accessible transit, fewer abortion clinics closing, and fewer sex workers being damned to unsafe work environments. Maybe.@sarratch