ColumnBreaking news: This week’s post isn’t depressing, or infuriating. In fact, it’s downright positive.

We all know the 2016 Oscars were a bit… white. And thanks to Chris Rock’s monologue, anyone who was within earshot of a television or radio in the past week knows just how white Oscar was in 2016.

Well, in addition to being diverse-phobic, the Oscars also, at first glance, seemed to be clueless about women’s needs. According to Refinery29, the Oscars seemingly didn’t provide a place — other than restrooms — for women to comfortably breastfeed. The news that turned out to be false, thankfully, was made public when a Los Angeles Times reporter saw actor Tom Hardy in the lobby during the award show. When asked what he was up to, Hardy said, “I’m just waiting for my wife to finish breast-pumping in the bathroom. She has to do it every hour.”

Well, it turns out that Oscar did have a few places for breastfeeding women to feed or pump comfortably and discreetly other than the bathrooms. According to an Academy letter that was sent to Refinery29, the Oscars ceremony had “a nurse on site and a private area set aside for this purpose. Discretion does not permit us to elaborate further other than to say that our talent department goes to great lengths to tailor each mom’s experience to fit her specific needs.”

While we were initially going to write about this bit of news to shame the Oscars, we’re happy that we didn’t have to. However, we know that there are still plenty of restaurants, establishments, stores, and public places that don’t go out of their way to accommodate breastfeeding women. So, we’re saying something we thought we’d never say before: We want more institutions to be like Oscar–at least about this one thing.

And the good news just keeps on coming.

It looks like South Dakota’s governor is one of the few progressive and caring politicians in the United States.

According to CNN, Dennis Daugaard, the state’s republican governor, vetoed a bill earlier this week that would have required transgender students who attend the state’s public schools “to use bathrooms and locker rooms that matched their sex birth.”

The South Dakota governor chose to veto the bill, HB 1008, because it “does not address any pressing issue concerning the school districts of South Dakota. As policymakers in South Dakota, we often recite that the best government is the government closest to the people. Local school districts can, and have, made necessary restroom and locker room accommodations that serve the best interests of all students, regardless of biological sex or gender identity.”

We’re incredibly happy this bill is dead as a door nail because it’s hard enough to be a transgender student in school — no one needs an extra helping of state-mandated discrimination to make life more difficult.

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Red carpet image via Shutterstock

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Watch this hella awkward experiment to see how guys react to a fat woman whom they thought was skinnier based on her profile pics on Tinder, the mobile dating app. And there’s a guy version, too, which is equally as not so fun. Boo.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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The post Tinder Fat People Experiments….Awkward! [Videos] appeared first on EcoSalon.

In just more than a week, the entire world will turn its attention to the winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. While most countries are on their best behavior while hosting the Games, the international spotlight has done little to rebuff Russia’s barbaric anti-gay policies.

When speaking with the BBC about how his city is preparing for the winter Olympics, Mayor Anatoly Pakhomov reiterated that visiting homosexuals have nothing to fear in Sochi (provided they keep their hands off the kiddos). He then proudly declared that “…we just say that it is your business, it’s your life. It’s not accepted here in the Caucasus where we live. We do not have them in our city.”

Well, how incredibly convenient. A complete lack of gay or lesbian individuals makes it much easier to enforce Russia’s recent “gay propaganda law” which makes it illegal to so much as mention homosexuality around minors.

It’s also a lie. “There are at least two gay clubs in the city,” Russia’s RT noted. Russian social networks also point to multiple lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities in the area.

When pressed, Pakhomov later admitted that he isn’t absolutely certain there are no gay people in Sochi. “I am not sure, but I don’t bloody know them,” he told the BBC.

Even more convenient. It’s much easier to hate something you don’t know or understand.

This episode of discriminatory speech is just the latest for Russia, leading some to question, yet again, why the Olympic Committee would have chosen Sochi as the site of the winter Olympics. After all, the games are supposed to be an event where all are welcome and have a chance to compete as equals on an international stage. Isn’t it hypocritical to allow a country with such a dramatic flair for homophobia to play host?

Many say yes, including the 27 Nobel laureates who joined Sir Ian McKellen in protest of Russia’s gay ‘propaganda’ ban, and multiple celebrities who’ve spoken out against the law. In a major move, the Obama Administration announced that no member of the Obama or Biden families would travel to attend the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, as a showing of solidarity with the homosexual community.

Calls for athlete boycotts of the winter Olympics in Sochi have met with mixed reviews, with people on both sides making compelling arguments. Ultimately, not much came of it, as this will be the biggest team the U.S. has ever sent to the winter Olympics.

Image: On September 7, 2013, a group of activists painted the pedestrian crossing stripes with rainbow colors in front of the Russian Embassy in Helsinki, Finland. The colors were meant to protest the Russian anti-LGBT sentimentality and legislation, notably the bans on “homosexual propaganda.” Credit: Murrur/Wikimedia Commons

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Iran shows fear of women getting ahead by simply barring them from being educated.

Last week we asked, is Saudi Arabia’s policy of segregating women designed to help or hinder their economic independence? Tricky to answer – but in Iran, things are a little more clear-cut. Its government has just announced that 36 of the country’s universities will be barring women from enrolling on a total of 77 BA and BSc degrees for at least the next year.

Why? Two reasons are offered: firstly, a lack of demand for women employees in the jobs these courses work towards…and secondly, quoting a senior Iranian education official:

Some fields are not very suitable for women’s nature.

– Abolfazl Hasani, as quoted at Rooz.

In other words – women aren’t wanted in these professions, even if they were capable of excelling in them, which allegedly they aren’t.

Time to quote some damning statistics.

• Women account for nearly 60% of University students in Iran. (New York Times).
• In 2011, women outnumbered men 3 to 2 in successfully passing university entrance exams. (Telegraph)
• In 2009, just 15% of the Iranian workforce (3.5 million) were women, as compared to the global average of 45%. (Payvand News Of Iran)
• In the same year, less than 4% of employed women were in senior, executive or managerial positions. (Payvand News Of Iran)
• Iran’s University of Isfahan justified barring women from taking its mining engineering degree by stating that 98% of the course’s female graduates ended up unemployed. (Telegraph)

In a way, it’s a neat argument: the education system is barring women to avoid wasting money teaching them professions they will find it difficult to find employment in. Why would they find it so difficult? Because of endemic sexual discrimination.

It’s also easy to construct an argument for this being a panicked reaction to the development of the women’s rights movement in Iran, as follows: under Iranian law, women need the permission of their husbands to work. This means that a career-minded woman would either be choosier with their choice of husband, or refuse to seek one altogether – just the kind of erosion of a traditionalist way of life that a high-ranking theocrat would be afraid of.

To Iranian Nobel laureate and human rights campaigner Shirin Ebadi, it stinks of repression – and she’s demanding the United Nations launches an investigation:

The aim [of single-sex degree courses] is that women will give up their opposition and demands for their own rights.

  – Shirin Ebadi, as quoted in the Telegraph.

 A year ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described proposals to segregate students as “shallow and unwise,” and called for their cancellation.

It seems a year is a long time in Iranian politics.

Image: Paul Keller.

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A fascinating social experiment is about to begin in the Arab state of Saudi Arabia.

Under Saudi Sharia law, women are accorded anything but equal rights – most famously, they must be chaperoned while outdoors and are forbidden to drive (although enforcement of the latter is lax in rural areas). Far more importantly, their economic freedom is severely curtailed: while some 70% of University attendees are female, women make up less than 15% of the workforce. Progressive? Hardly.

So, what to make of news that the Saudis are building a women-only industrial city in the Eastern Province of Hofuf – with similar plans for four more cities elsewhere? As the Guardian reports here, it’s a project developed by the Saudi Industrial Property Authority (MODON), from a proposal by a group of Saudi businesswomen. The stated aim is to provide a place for women to develop their own economic potential, including – to quote businesswoman Hussan al-Aun – “a specialised training centre to help women develop their talents and train them to work at factories. This is essential to cut unemployment among our female graduates.”

It’s very easy to see this as a cold-blooded money-grabbing move by a government keen to find an apparently progressive way to reinforce sexual segregation while boosting the economy – but is it that simple? Last year King Abdullah announced that from 2015, women could vote in local elections and consultative assemblies – and earlier this year a ban on employing women in lingerie and cosmetic shops was overturned. These are not token reforms.

It’s also important to note that the best way to start a revolution is to gather together members of an underdog class in one place and give them the tools to develop a power base – or, put another way by Zoe Williams at the Guardian:

…when you educate people, refuse to let them work and then suddenly unleash them, en masse, into economic productivity, that’s almost an open invitation to them to be better than you.

None of this will be lost to the pro-segregationists – and let’s not forget that this is the country where private companies are violating employment law by openly hiring only single or non-pregnant married women. However this plays out, there will be considerable pressure to undermine any unofficial independence movement for women, or the ascendancy of women’s rights in the Saudi workplace. But for now? In a region housing some of the world’s richest people, money brings respect – and demonstrating a flair for earning money could be exactly the way Saudi women could fight against systemic prejudice.

Image: zbigphotography

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