Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day. The day was first professed by the Socialist Party of America in 1909, the idea arising from women’s rights movements in industrializing nations around the turn of the last century. Its purpose is to celebrate the achievements of women throughout history, as well as engage in the ongoing struggle for gender equality.

March is also Women’s History Month. <-That is a website curated by the U.S. Library of Congress that showcases women’s battles and triumphs with interesting and informative stories, audio, video and still images.

If you are a dude and still reading this post: here, have a cookie. (I baked them myself.) That’s for seeing the word “women’s” and not immediately deciding to GTFO.

However, if you are a dude blogger, social media influencer, or a Big Willie with a platform of any kind?

Then GTFO and go say something that celebrates any of the fucking mind-blowing achievements of women throughout history, and/or about the ongoing struggles for gender equality. Then come back here and I’ll give you ALL THE COOKIES.

Because, my dear dudes, if women could solve gendered violence, sexist oppression, rape culture, and misogyny in all its forms – to say nothing of the erasure and minimization of women’s contributions to humanity throughout history – we would have already done so. (Kind of like anti-Black racism is not a problem Black people can solve.) And if you were looking for me to do this work for your infotainment, HAHAHA NO. That’s not how the work… um…works.

On the other hand, if you’re sincerely looking to do that work, and seeking inspiration or a place to start digging in, I will help you find that. YOU’RE WELCOME.

I’ve already posted two links above, both of which contain content designed for this very purpose. If that doesn’t float your megayacht, here are a few news stories I happened to stumble across in the last few days:

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The Hidden Epidemic of Brain Injuries From Domestic Violence

Research shows domestic violence survivors can sustain head trauma more often than football players. But the injuries are almost never diagnosed.
Read more [@ New York Times Magazine]

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Victory for Bill Cosby after Supreme Court rejects appeal to revive sex case

On Monday, the Supreme Court sided with Bill Cosby by upholding a Pennsylvania court’s decision to toss out the iconic comedian’s conviction on sex assault charges against Andrea Constand in 2018 because of due process rights violations…. “Many people are calling for projects for him,” and he is considering a final standup tour, [Cosby’s spokesperson Andrew] Wyatt said.
Read more [@ New York Daily News]

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How this woman you’ve never heard of shaped our world

Why do we need National Women’s History Month? Because you’ve never heard of her. Which “her” am I talking about? In this case, a woman who changed how we live and designed products that saved lives.
Read more [@ Fortune]

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[CONTENT NOTE: description of gruesome violence against a woman; no images.]

Dismembered torso of woman found in shopping cart on Brooklyn street

The dismembered torso of a woman was discovered stuffed in a shopping cart by a horrified passerby on a Brooklyn street early Thursday, police said.
Read more  [@ New York Daily News]

-and-

Human leg discovered in Brooklyn trash less than 3 blocks from where woman’s dismembered torso found days earlier

A human leg was found discarded in the trash on a Brooklyn street — less than three blocks from where a woman’s limbless headless torso was discovered four days earlier, police said.
Read more [@ New York Daily News]

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Handyman charged with murder after woman’s body found in backyard septic tank

Florida officials believe the body is that of Cynthia Cole, who was last seen Feb. 24. Her handyman, Keoki Hilo Demich, was arrested on a charge of second-degree murder.
Read more [@ NBC News]

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What’s with Wikipedia and women?

[W]hen biographies of women are added, they sometimes are challenged, as [physiologist and full professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Rajini] Rao’s was, over whether these women are important enough to merit coverage in a general-interest encyclopedia. In 2018, when physicist Donna Strickland received the Nobel Prize, Wikipedia had no page about her. An article had once existed — but it was deleted from the encyclopedia by community consensus after a volunteer questioned her notability.
Read more [@ ASBMB Today (published by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology)]

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Pennsylvania man accused of hiding in attic of woman he met on OnlyFans, recording her

Prosecutors say a 20-year-old man from Pennsylvania figured out where a woman he met on the website OnlyFans lived, drove to her home and hid in her attic, coming down to take videos of her while she slept. Court documents released last Monday also accuse 20-year-old Mauricio Damian Guerrero of stealing some of the woman’s underwear and trying to place a tracking device on her car, the Associated Press reports… Guerrero faces four felony counts of burglary and was released on $2,500 cash bail last week.
Read more [@ Newsnation]

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How the Mainstream Movement Against Gender-Based Violence Fails Black Workers and Survivors

Allegations of racism at a Washington coalition highlight a broader movement’s betrayal.
Read more [@ Mother Jones]

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Bills to restrict abortion are advancing in several red states, offering a preview of a post-Roe America.

Both sides of the abortion debate anticipate that come July, the Supreme Court will have overturned Roe v. Wade and with it the constitutional right to abortion, handing anti-abortion activists a victory they have sought for five decades. But from Florida to Idaho, Republican-led state legislatures are not waiting: They are operating as if Roe has already been struck down, advancing new restrictions that aim to make abortion illegal in as many circumstances as possible.
Read more [@ New York Times]

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Women Can’t Go Back to the Pre-Pandemic Status Quo

Looking at how people really felt pre-pandemic makes clear that a return to that status quo is untenable. It’s safe to say that one driver of women’s greater stress and burnout in our findings was the well-documented, disproportionate caregiving burden they shoulder, a condition only further entrenched during the pandemic. In other research we’ve conducted with MBAs, we found that even among dual-career couples who claim to give both spouses’ careers the same priority, women are doing the lion’s share of domestic work, a setup which adds cognitive and time burdens to women’s experiences that their male colleagues, by and large, don’t share.
Read more [@ Harvard Business Review]

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Cuomo Re-emerges and Blames ‘Cancel Culture’ for His Fall

Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo emerged from his self-imposed exile on Sunday, using his first public appearance in more than six months to cast himself as a victim of “cancel culture” and to vow to reinsert himself in New York’s political discourse. Speaking at God’s Battalion of Prayer Church, a Black congregation in Brooklyn, Mr. Cuomo defiantly told a sparse collection of about 100 congregants that he wanted to “tell my truth,” describing cancel culture as a “frightening” form of extremism and claiming he had been “vindicated” in the months since he resigned in August following a string of sexual harassment allegations.
Read more [@ New York Times]

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The most insidious thing about inequality is that to the extent that you personally benefit from it, you tend to be more blind to it. No, actually It’s worse than that: some very interesting studies show that the more you benefit from unearned privilege, the more likely you are to believe the Just World Fallacy is no fallacy at all. That you in fact earned that benefit, and deserve it. That you are entitled to it. And worse still, your compassion and empathy diminish, and you are more likely to believe that others who do not share the same unearned privilege you enjoy therefore do not deserve it. Q.E.D.

So, my beloved dudes, will you please get to work fixing this shit? Now would be good. Wait, let me check my calendar… yeah, now works for me.

Kthxbye.