Violence against women and girls

COMMENTARY: Women’s History Month in poetry and prose

Kit-Bacon Gressitt – SDGLN Contributor
March 13th, 2013

March is National Women’s History Month, a fact I note every year, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. I am conflicted. And this particular bit of oppositional thinking cannot be attributed to my nutty genetic code. … Well maybe the predisposition for it can. Regardless, I’ve an active distaste for the need of such a month.

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COMMENTARY: I didn’t ask for the anal probe! * | VIDEO

Kit-Bacon Gressitt – SDGLN Contributor
February 25th, 2013

In the realm of women and their pregnancies, there are two basic types of ultrasounds. There’s the type folks commonly think of being performed on a pregnant woman’s belly. This type entails the jelly, the transducer that fits in the palm of the technician’s hand, the screen with the captured image of a fetus, and the proud parental assumption that that shadowy oblong shape is the biggest penis ever seen on a fetus. Nonetheless, it’s a sweetly benign image, stereotyped in popular media and other fantasies.

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COMMENTARY on domestic violence: Why didn't she just leave?

Kit-Bacon Gressitt – SDGLN Contributor
October 8th, 2012

Picture a sere summer night in Phoenix, Arizona, circa 1982.¹

I lay on a crinkly table in a cluttered ER, joking with the doc, bribing him with a promise of homemade shortbread if he could fix my face without leaving scars, looking anywhere but in his eyes, and I noticed a police officer nearby.

When I was all stitched and tidied up, I went to the cop and heard a quavering voice tell him that I wanted to press charges against my husband for assault.

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COMMENTARY: Prop 35 on human trafficking poses a progressive dilemma

Kit-Bacon Gressitt – SDGLN Contributor
October 1st, 2012

It is a no-brainer to predict that the anti-human trafficking ballot initiative in California, Proposition 35, will pass by a landslide in November. The measure’s increased prison sentences and fines for labor and sex traffickers are popular responses to crime.

Even Maxine Doogan, spokesperson for the measure’s primary opposition, said Prop 35 is going to pass: “Everyone is against human trafficking. Of course we need to throw the book at human traffickers.”

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COMMENTARY: Bitch session

Kit-Bacon Gressitt – SDGLN Contributor
July 2nd, 2012

(Editor’s note: Warning for the faint of heart. Adult language ahead.)

We were a small group, three women and three men, assembled at a coffeehouse last week to talk about a business venture. We were mostly strangers to each other, but for the meeting’s host. Still, the inevitable quests to establish credibility were civil and benign.

Except that, in the course of our discussion about media targeting females, one of the folks pointed out that it would be very important to prevent our programming from turning into bitch sessions.