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Great news! The Obama administration announced late Monday that it would dropping its effort to limit sales of Plan B to girls and women 15 and over. This means girls of any age will be able to buy the pill, which can prevent pregnancy up to 72 hours after unprotected sex, over the counter without restrictions.

But before we celebrate, let us head the always wise words of conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, who, on the always fair and balanced Fox News channel, said the following about the development:

“It’s a good deal for pedophiles, a good deal for people who commit statutory rape against young girls… If mothers and fathers across this country hear this and they think, ‘Well, I guess my daughter or her boyfriend or her rapist can go out to a pharmacy and get a bunch of, you know, hormone pills to give a little girl.’ We don’t really know the effect of a spiking or dropping a little girl’s — in many cases a young woman’s or a little girl’s hormonal levels. It’s outrageous! These girls can’t get their ears pierced, they can’t take an Advil at school without parental permission. Yet, they can go into a pharmacy in this Brave New World of women’s equality and — quote — reproductive health and get a morning after pill.”

Read more at Feministing

As an actor, Martha Plimpton has conquered the stage, screen and television. The Emmy Award-winning thespian, has been in over 30 films including, of course, The Goonies, Running on Empty, Pecker, Parenthood (“electric ear cleaner,” anyone?) and I Shot Andy Warhol. As an outspoken activist, Plimpton is taking on misogyny and the attack on our reproductive rights, freedom, choice, health and access. She is one of the founders of A is For, an organization that advocates for and supports organizations protecting abortion and reproductive rights. Recently, she was the keynote speaker at the Physicians for Reproductive Health‘s annual Rashbaum-Tiller Awards Ceremony, which honored Eve Espey, MD, MPH, and Willie Parker, MD, MPH, MSc, two doctors who provide outstanding abortion services. On Thursday Plimpton will be at a New York City fundraiser for A is For at the sex toy boutique Babeland (“electric ear cleaner” call back, anyone?) in Soho, along with A is For co-founder Lizz Winstead. You should “Come for a Cause.”

And now, without further ado, the Feministing Five with Martha Plimpton.

Katie Halper: Can you talk about your relationship with two amazing organizations: Physicians for Reproductive Health and A is For?

Martha Plimpton: A is For came about almost a year and a half ago now during the whole contraceptive mandate hearing on the hill debacle with Sandra Fluke. As I’m sure you were as well, we were all completely gobsmacked by the treatment she received. Is this the 21^st century? What? And it threw into real relief something which had been lying dormant in the culture for a long time. As a kid, I was involved as much as I could be with Planned Parenthood, in the early 90s when the clinic bombings were happening. Then we entered this period of relative calm when we weren’t really paying attention to what was going on on the state level. It wasn’t really making national news. And so the fact that abortion access was becoming less and less and less available across the country wasn’t really on people’s radar. And so when Sandra Fluke was horrifyingly excoriated, and we heard this vicious, misogynist, violent language, it inspired a lot of people to take a closer look at what was going on.  It just exposed this gross underbelly that we hadn’t really been paying attention to.

And so, some women friends and I got together in Los Angeles, we wanted to do something, we didn’t now really what. And we noticed on Twitter and elsewhere people were starting to say, “why don’t they just slap a scarlet letter on us and be done with it.” And I thought, hmm that’s not such a bad idea. And we decided we’d come up with a way to utilize that symbol of the Scarlet Letter and change its meaning, and appropriate it, and use it as a symbol of defiance and in recognition that we all, at some point, male and female, have worn this scarlet letter.  And we wanted to use it as way to raise awareness and build some kind of unity and so in doing that we created this organization A is For and basically what we are is an advocacy organization that ‘s there to provide not just financial support but strategic support for other organizations that are working in this field. And one of the organizations we partnered with was the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR). And then, I had some friends who were connected with Physicians for Reproductive Health and I was invited  to go to their Tiller Awards last year. And then they invited me to be their keynote speaker this year. They’re an incredible organization, obviously.

[…]

Read more at Feministing

As George Zimmerman’s trial begins, the stories of two very different shooters show the inequality behind the law

A man in Florida shoots a man he finds having sex with his wife, killing him. A woman in Florida shoots the wall to scare off an abusive husband, harming nobody. Guess which one was acquitted? Guess which one was convicted?

On March 10 of this year, around midnight, Ralph Wald, 70, of Brandon, Fla., got out of bed to get a drink and found Walter Conley, 32, having sex with his wife, Johanna Lynn Flores, 41, in the living room. He immediately went back into his bedroom, grabbed his gun and shot Conley three times. Conley died. Wald claims that he thought Conley was a stranger who had broken in and was raping his wife – despite the fact that Conley lived next door, had been his wife’s roommate and lover, and had his wife’s name tattooed onto his neck and arm. During a 911 call, when the dispatcher asked Wald if the man he shot was dead, Wald responded, “I hope so!” Wald never used the word “rape” in later reports to police, opting instead for “fornicate.” And while the fact that the two were lovers doesn’t imply consent, Flores has never accused Conley of rape — nor do prosecutors buy that that’s what Wald actually thought was happening. They say that Wald, who suffers from erectile dysfunction, killed Conley in a jealous rage. Flores admits that she and Conley had sex regularly before and after her marriage to Wald. While testifying, Wald explained that his erectile dysfunction and his wife’s reluctance to have sex with him made them compatible: “In fact, she would joke a lot with me … that we were a perfect couple … She didn’t want to do it, and I couldn’t do it.” On May 30, after deliberating for two hours, a jury found Wald not guilty. After the verdict was announced, Wald continued to show no remorse: “If the same thing happened again, I would do the same thing.”

[…]

Read more at Salon

That’s right… we now know what well over two hundred people will be doing on the evenings of June 28th & 29th, when VF13 “Centerpiece” world premiere, COMMIE CAMP, ignites the screen at New York’s Tribeca Cinema.

Calls flooded the VF offices and tickets SOLD OUT completely for the added show in just two days, making this the fastest selling program in the 13 years that VF has been running.

Excerpted from Domanivisionfilm

Dear friends,

You can buy tickets here. It’s program 6-B.

There’s a nice bar at the theater, too, where we can chat after the screening.

And I have the date for my California premier. Tickets aren’t on sale yet, but I’ll let you know when they are. Please help spread the word on that screening because the theater it’s in is huuuuuge! 600 seats! It’s a really nice deco theater from the 1920s, by the way. See the image above.

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

Rehtaeh Parsons was a 17-year-old Canadian high student who hanged herself in April. Rehtaeh started having suicidal thoughts when she was 15 after she was raped by four boys who photographed the violation and sent it around to their friends and classmates. As if that weren’t bad enough, for the next 17 months, Rehtaeh’s classmates shunned, tormented and bulliedher mercilessly. No charges were ever filed.

Two months to the day after Rehtaeh’s death, feminists are launching a day of awareness around violence against women and a commemoration of Rehtaeh. As the organizers explain on the Hands Up for Rehtaeh page,

in light of this [Rehtaeh’s story], Steubenville, and numerous other rapes and sexual assaults in the news, we are making a call to action.

We are tired of girls and women being treated like sexual objects and the effect rape culture has on global society.

To that end, we are organizing a global day of awareness on violence against women, particularly rape culture (the institutional bias against victims and failure to prevent rape and sexual assault).

We ask you to join us on June 7th and write “Rehtaeh” on your wrist to let the world know you stand against rape culture.

Also: post pictures of your wrist (with “Rehtaeh” written on it) on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and explain why you’re doing so.

[…]

Read more at Feministing

If you want to kill a prostitute or escort, you may want to consider moving to Texas.

Wednesday, A Bexar County jury delivered on verdict on a case involving a man who fatally shot an escort in the neck and back. Here is what the prosecution, the defense and, of course, the defendant all agreed happened. Ezekiel Gilbert, 27 at the time, found an ad for an escort on Craigslist on Christmas Eve, 2009. The escort, Lenora Ivie Frago, 23, came to Gilbert’s apartment that night. The two did not have sex. Gilbert shot Frago in the neck and back. Frago was paralyzed. Frago died months later. The defense claims that Gilbert paid Frago $150 for sex. She refused to have sex with him and walked around his apartment for twenty minutes. Gilbert asked for his money back and Frago refused, saying she had to give it to her driver/ pimp. Gilbert shot Frago in the neck and back. Frago was paralyzed and died months later.

The prosecution claims that Gilbert shot Frago for refusing to have sex with him and points to the fact that Gilbert never mentioned anything about a theft in the police interview. The defense claims that Gilbert shot her because he was trying to recover the $150 he paid her for sex, which she did not deliver.

[…]

Read more at Policymic

What do 222 million women in developing nations around the world have in common? They all want access to modern contraceptive. In a new video and infographic, Population Action International explains that if the U.S. contributed a mere .03% of its federal budget towards international family planning, they could provide the 222 million women– more than the combined populations of Spain, The Netherlands, France, Germany and Belgium– with the contraception they so desperately want and need. This would save the lives of 70,000 women and prevent the deaths of one million infants each year!

Read more at Feministing

Powerful men say the darnedest things, especially when it comes to systemic and rampant rape in the military.

I’d like to acknowledge their feats and award them for the lengths to which they’ve gone in order to distort the reality of the military’s rape problem. They have managed to avoid the obvious causes of and solutions to rape in the military. And they’ve shown remarkable creativity and imagination in the way they understand it. Coming in third, with the bronze, is General Mark A. Welsh III, a top Air Force commander. This was his insightful response to May’s Pentagon report showing that sexual assault had jumped from 19,000 cases in 2010 to 26,000 in 2012: sexual assault happens all the time [jazz hands] outside of the military. I mean everyone [jazz hands] is doing it. So get used to it! And we have hookup culture to blame. I, of course paraphrase, but barely. Here’s what he actually said when testifying at a Senate hearing on sexual assault in the military: 20% of women report they had been sexually assaulted, “before they came into the military … So they come in from a society where this occurs … Some of it is the hookup mentality of junior high even and high school students now, which my children can tell you about from watching their friends and being frustrated by it.”

General, I’m sorry your children and their friends are frustrated with their love lives. They must feel just like the women (and men) who are raped by their fellow officers and superiors and then on top of that, face indifference at best and retaliation at worst, if they report the sexual assault.

[…]

Read more at Policymic

The case of “Beatriz,” the pseudonym of a Salvadoran woman denied a life-saving abortion in  country where abortion is illegal without any exception whatsoever has drawn international attention, controversy, disbelief and advocacy, organizing and activism, including this Care2 petition, which collected over 27.000 signatures.

In the latest development, Monday, Beatriz underwent a Caesarian section and had an “induced birth” and not — officially, at least — an abortion. Yet, as Jodi Jacobson writes at RH Reality Check,  Beatriz “had a hysterotomy, a form of abortion carried out through c-section.” In other words, thanks to the dominance of conservative sectors like the Catholic Church and anti-choice movements in El Salvador, people are pretending an abortion isn’t an abortion.

Because the 22-year old woman  suffers from lupus and kidney problems and almost died during the delivery of her first child, Beatriz’s doctors had wanted to terminate Beatriz’s pregnancy, which they feared would kill her. Also, the fetus had anacephely,  a severe and fatal birth defect in which parts of the brain and skull are missing. The longest a baby born with anacephaly can live is days.

Thus Beatriz’s case seemed particularly sympathetic, given that the pregnancy wasn’t viable anyway. But none of this mattered in a country where abortion is illegal even in cases of rape, incest or for the health and even life of a mother. And when doctors asked for a guarantee that they wouldn’t be prosecuted if they performed an abortion, they were denied.

[…]

Read more at Care2