Mu Sochua (b. 1954) is an outspoken and respected Cambodian politician who has dedicated her life to fighting for women’s rights and democracy in Southeast Asia. As the daughter of disappeared Sino-Khmer parents, Sochua spent most of her young adult life in exile in the United States. When she returned to Cambodia in 1991, she strove to rebuild her country.

Mu Sochua became a member of her nation's Cabinet in 1998, after having returned after 18 years in exile during the period called the Killing Fields. She was then one of two women in high power there. She was the first woman to preside over the Office of Women's Affairs. Prior to her, it had been considered a man's job.

During her time in governance Sochua set out with a very clear set of goals:

To end human/sex trafficking between Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries.

Mobilize women in Cambodia to run for office, convincing 12,000 women to run in 2002 (over 900 were elected!)

To write and pass laws that protected women. Specifically as it pertained to the levels of healthcare and education granted to women and young girls.

And finally, use her position to put an end to the rampant corruption within the Cambodian government.

At almost every turn there was both political opposition as well as threats of violence and intimidation waiting for her. Even when she returned to her country in the late 90's, Sochua was aware that members of her own party had been repeatedly arrested and several others had attempts made on their lives or were successfully assassinated while serving.

As the government grew increasingly corrupt, Sochua stepped down and became vice president of the Cambodia National Rescue Party, Cambodia’s main electoral opposition party. Still dedicated to her work combating sex trafficking and promoting gender equality, she received a Vital Voices’ Leadership Award and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

Unfortunately, all this turbulence within the Cambodian government only continued to intensify over the course of her career, and in 2017 Sochua felt she had no other choice than to once more escape her home country to protect both herself and her cause when the opposition party was officially dissolved and its leaders condemned to decades in prison. She is working now from afar, trying to mobilize grassroots efforts around the country and the world. 

Her most recent speech was at the 2024 Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy where she reaffirms her commitment to human rights in Cambodia and worldwide.

Pictured in the OP are the founders of Jane, an underground network in Chicago, Illinois USA that assisted women in getting abortions. From the left moving right: Martha Scott, Jeanne Galatzer-Levy, Abby Parisers, Sheila Smith and Madeline Schwenk.

Martha Scott was 19 in 1965, when her friend's sister became pregnant and Scott helped her find a doctor to perform an abortion. The group connected women seeking abortions with doctors, and later, performed abortions themselves. Their clients were informed they were not doctors, but doing abortions themselves allowed them to keep costs low. They made women aware of the services through signs with slogans like "'Pregnant? Don't Want to Be? Call Jane." The group operated for seven years and performed an estimated 11,000 abortions; no deaths were ever reported.

Quote from Scott: "You're messing around inside somebody else's body. It's not necessarily given that you won't do harm. It wasn't perfect, by any means. But we were dealing with women who really didn't have other options."

Quote from Galatzer-Levy: "I hadn't had so much as a speeding ticket [when I joined]. But abortion really was the front line, it was where women were dying."

In 1972, two women reported Jane because their sister was seeking an abortion, and the women believed it was murder. All seven founders were arrested. Six months later, Roe v. Wade was decided and the charges were dropped. Read more here (link).

Complete source for the EBU Sport guidelines: https://www.ebu.ch/files/live/sites/ebu/files/Publications/strategic/open/EBU_Sport_raising_the_bar.pdf

I'm sure many of you have already seen some of these images floating around online. On one hand it does feel like a genuine effort towards a positive shift in how women's athletics are treated compared to their male contemporaries. That said, I also feel like the bigger benefit would come from changing the requirements around female athletic uniforms within certain institutions in the first place.

It was only five years ago that the Norwegian women's beach handball team was fined for choosing to wear shorts instead of the "proper" bikini bottoms approved by the European Handball Federation. The team was fined 150 euros for each player on the team. (Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/07/21/1018768633/a-womens-beach-handball-team-is-fined-for-not-wanting-to-wear-bikini-bottoms) Male handball players, of course, are allowed to wear shorts without issue.

What are your thoughts upon seeing/reading about these new guidelines? Do you feel like it's a step in the correct direction or a further obfuscation of the issue when it comes to sexualizing women in the public eye?

A few years old discussion I passed on tumblr that made me think about so many of the discussions I've seen here on the sub recently.

Specifically a topic I see submitted here all too often. Ones where young women are asking for advice on how to say "No".

They ask how to stand up for themselves or how to stop fawning, smiling, and acquiescing even while knowing they're only doing so out of fear or some deeply ingrained desire to appease and diffuse. Most specifically in situations with men, but just as often sometimes in situations with other women. Sometimes even in debate with other women here in this very sub.

It's hard not to see how this applies to so many things in women's lives. Especially so as it pertains to the trappings of modern liberal feminism i.e. "Anything a woman chooses to do is feminist!"

At the end of the day, are women really choosing to participate in these rituals? Or is it merely the illusion of choice? Is it a choice at all when compared to what we all know the consequences of saying "No" actually are?

It's far more comforting to both men and women to think that women are making a choice, that they are content and empowered by actively participating in patriarchy, rather than unwilling passengers trained since birth towards compliance under threat of retaliation.

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/11/18/us-women-are-outpacing-men-in-college-completion-including-in-every-major-racial-and-ethnic-group/

The paragraph that struck me as the most interesting was this:

>A 2021 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans without a bachelor’s degree why they chose not to seek one – and found some gender differences in the responses. For example, men without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than women to say they just didn’t want to get one. In turn, women without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than men to say they couldn’t afford a four-year degree.

Regardless, big ups to all our American sisters improving themselves and continuing to advance their education. Knowledge is the most powerful tool a woman can have. Now especially more than ever.

In 2002 Maria de los Angeles Veron, known as "Marita", went missing. Over the years this case became a symbol of the fight against human trafficking in Argentina and most of South America. Especially because of what Marita's mother, Susana Trimarco, sought to accomplish on behalf of her missing daughter.

Like too many other unfortunate women and girls before her, it was speculated that Marita was kidnapped in Tucuman in 2002 and forced into prostitution in La Rioja. Trimarco was a proactive force in the immediate hours of her daughter's disappearance, surveying neighbors and other eye witnesses and collecting statements and evidence to present to police.

Soon after, another lead opened up the possibility that traffickers had routed Marita to a disco whose owners, police investigators say, have had ties to organized crime. The reports kept coming. But whenever Trimarco asked for police help, it seemed to her they put more obstacles in her way. It took the police days to follow up on leads, if they followed them at all.

With her daughter missing, and her family falling apart, Trimarco had come to believe that the authorities weren't just incompetent, but also somehow complicit in her daughter's disappearance. So she took action. Trimarco decided to go after her daughter on her own.

Posing as a madame, Trimarco began going through various bars and brothels under the guise of purchasing prostituted women and girls. With the help of a police investigator named Jorge Tobar, Trimarco began tracking and documenting in extraordinary detail what is now widely acknowledged as a vast human-trafficking network with ties to the police, the legal system, and government officials. In October 2002, when Trimarco and three Chilean journalists went undercover in La Rioja, men with ties to the brothels pursued and shot at them. In operations like these, Trimarco continued to find and rescue trafficked girls.

She survived two murder attempts, her house was burnt down, she received countless death threats, but nothing stopped Susana Trimarco from looking for her missing daughter or from continuing to fight for trafficked women and girls.

In October 2007 she set up the Fundacion Maria de los Angeles to help survivors of sex trafficking – the organization provides free legal, psychological and social support to survivors and their families.

Trimarco was among those given the first US Secretary of State International Women of Courage Award in 2007 by Condoleezza Rice, for her efforts against human trafficking.

In 2008, her lobbying efforts led to human trafficking being made a federal crime in Argentina.

After going on two decades now, Marita still has not been found. Yet thousands of other victims of sex trafficking have been recovered and given a second chance at life thanks to Susana Trimarco's bravery and compassion.

This is a perfect time to read the brilliant and unforgettable graphic novel(s) Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, about growing up in Iran during and after the Iranian Revolution, and the rise of the oppressive theocracy that persists to this day.

Both graphic novels are available free online (Persepolis vol. 1, Persepolis vol. 2)

It also was adapted to a wonderful film (co-directed and co-written by the author) which is available to watch for free on Sundance Now (you do have to sign up for the free trial, unfortunately).

This post was making the rounds not too long ago and I've been meaning to use it as a springboard for discussion here for a while now.

I've always had a larger chest compared to my peers. From the minute puberty struck me I was carrying the weight of the world on my aching shoulders. Outside of pain there were the usual gamut of issues that came with being well-endowed, including unwanted male attention and the perception that society makes of voluptuous women and young girls regardless of their actual chastity. There's been an association with large breasts and perceived promiscuity for ages.

Though what I really want to talk about when it comes to society's fixation on large breasts is what's highlighted in the commentary of the image: Large breasts are not considered desirable in their natural state.

I came of age in the early 2000s-2010s. This was the height of unnaturally thin, hyper-feminine blonde women as the peak of female beauty standards. This was also the beginnings of plastic surgery starting to become more widely accepted rather than a well-kept secret behind closed doors. Pamela Anderson is probably the most well known example of a starlet known for her unnaturally massive bust. The rapid rise and spread of internet porn saw so many women getting breast augmentation than even in so many decades prior combined.

It all impressed one thing on me soundly even then: The only large breasted women you saw during that era of entertainment were surgically enhanced ones.

Any woman with natural breasts larger than a C were considered "deflated" "saggy" or an indication of old age and/or neglect of one's body. I knew of more than one girl in my high school who would admit to sleeping in their bras at night for fear of even the slightest sagging. Movies, shows, fashion, games-- any display of large breasts as desirable were explicitly in tandem with the gravity defying perkiness that only silicone implants or questionable anime physics could provide.

I remember this all having an incredibly strong impact on me, even as an otherwise masculine/GNC dressing teen. Despite being young and relatively fit I still felt like something was wrong with my breasts since they didn't look like the other large breasted women I'd seen in movies or ads (or, unfortunately, porn). What I didn't understand then was that not even smaller breasts are always 100% perky with nipples facing the clouds 24/7. I even know a good number of large breasted women who got nipple piercing with the express purpose of keeping their nipples pert (and to avoid what were referred to as "dinner plate" nipples).

With Ozempic giving unnatural thinness a renaissance and plastic surgery, botox and fillers becoming a commonplace thing, I feel like we're once again seeing this double-sided blade wielded against large breasts.

Breasts sag with age. Larger breasts also have to contend with gravity. Or ill-fitted clothes. Or having the life sucked out of them from breastfeeding babies. Even young and full breasts on a woman as fit and healthy as an Olympian will droop because that's how our bodies hold heavy weight. Larger breasts will then, of course, have larger nipples as a result.

For a sex obsessed culture that's even more obsessed with large breasts in particular, it's fascinating to me that same culture recoils in disgust at what naturally large breasts actually look like.

It's getting into election season here in the US with prominent seats in various states hinging on voter turnout starting this May on into September. With our government looking to roll back voting right protections, men's growing open misogyny and a concerning romanticization of the tradwife lifestyle in popular culture, I figure it would be a good time to remind ourselves of how little and how not long ago things have changed.

To find out when your state primaries are and what seats are up in the general election refer to this document, https://vote.gov/, or check your local state government's website and information pages.

The expected role of women in society has always been one of subjugation and humiliation. However, this is only ever admitted in popular culture when it's men who are subjected to the same treatment. More often than not as a warning, that giving women their rights will see them wanting to take men's away next. "This, my good man, could be YOU." These arguments are almost word for word the same ones we hear today.

Generations of women fought and died for their daughters' and granddaughter's right to vote. Don't take their sacrifice for granted; go out and vote!

Source and for more Historical Suffragette Postcards and Propaganda: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/suffrage_images/