The Internet: Creating a Safe Space

Access to the internet is a basic right that allows women to learn, promote themselves professionally, band together, and obtain help. One law student in Pakistan used the internet to publicize her stab wounds, helping her to win a legal case against her assaulter.[1] However, the internet can also provide an additional space for women …

Camptowns and Prostitution: Why Men Shouldn’t Need a Sexual Release

The mayor of Osaka, Japan threatened in December 2017 to cut ties with Osaka’s sister city of San Francisco, California. Why? Because of one statue depicting three comfort women.[1],[2] The term “comfort women” refers to the women—South Korean, Chinese, Filipino and others—enslaved and raped by the Japanese army around the time of second world war. …

The Cultural Conundrum of Sexuality in Thailand

During her time as Thailand’s first female Minister of Tourism and Sports (2014-2017), Ms. Kobkarn Wattanavrangkul was extremely vocal about the need to end sex tourism in the country. Her desire was to see “Thailand be about quality tourism” without the seedy draw of the sex-trade [1]. Recently, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha has expressed similar …

Speaking Sexism: Which Dialect Do You Speak?

Every language is shaped by the culture of those who speak it. As sexism persists in the cultures of the world, it will continue to persist in language. During a recent opportunity to live in Chile and learn Spanish in an immersive environment, I discovered the way sexism is demonstrated through the Spanish language. In …

Data and Beauty Pageants

The Miss Peru contest begins with contestants giving their name, hometown and their bust, waist and hip measurements. This year, they still gave numbers, but instead of their measurements, all 23 contestants gave statistics about violence towards women in Peru. The rest of the evening, the contestants answered questions about how they would solve violence …

What We Can All Learn From the #metoo Movement

Me too. When I was in China a few years ago, I stood on a public bus one day with some other girl friends on our way into town. The bus was relatively empty, so there was a lot of space to spread out. One older man ignored that and decided to come stand close …

The Insidious Reality of Rape Culture

I experienced my first conscious encounter with rape culture as an eleven-year-old. I was leaving class one day when I heard one of my classmates say to a couple of her friends, “Mr. Jones* is such a perv! He totally looks down my shirts!” Her friends agreed, and they continued angrily discussing similar studies as …

Women’s Mobility

I spent over five months researching women’s mobility in practice to create the world’s first scale of women’s mobility. I considered myself a feminist and a researcher of women’s issues before this project, yet I was unaware of how much an inability to more freely in public damages the lives of some women. Women in …

Imprisoned by Fear: Street Harassment

Last year I studied abroad in Jerusalem, where street harassment and cat calls were  as much a part of the city life as delicious falafel or one-thousand-year-old churches. The catcalls mainly consisted of harmless proclamations of love or joking marriage proposals. But my female classmates and I never knew when one of those instances would …

Removing the Veil: The Real Path to Prostitution

“Sexual exploitation is a practice by which person(s) achieve sexual gratification or financial gain or advancement through the abuse of a person’s sexuality by abrogating that person’s human right to dignity, equality, autonomy, and physical and mental well-being… it is the right of every human being to live free of exploitation… sexual power is a …