These two young women living in Bayview/Hunter’s Point in San Francisco, through their involvement with Stop Patriarchy!, decided to take a stand against porn and rape culture:



One of them said, “I’m not gonna lie, I’ve watched porn.  And I’m always like, ‘Why does the woman look like she’s dying’??”  After having engaged with Sunsara Taylor’s talk, “From the Expanding Porn Industry to the Aggressive Religious Patriarchs: Stop the War on Women!”, and with a good sense of the relationship between porn as an industry that enslaves women, and the objectifying and dehumanizing impact it has on broader society, they went out after school to spread it around!  Here’s some of what that looked like:









These youth in Hunter’s Point are surrounded at every turn by porn culture that celebrates pimping and has turned the more-accessible-than-ever internet into an avalanche of sexualized torture, the “dog-eat-dog” poison of individualism, and the aggressive campaigns of the anti-abortion movement.  Many of them, upon engaging with Stop Patriarchy!, are acting out against all that in different ways, and some of them will join us this summer on Stop Patriarchy’s Abortion Rights Freedom Ride.  

In this moment, when the system is doing everything it can to make sure this generation thinks that they should just be grateful for what they do have — and that real, radical change is either unnecessary or impossible — there is a real basis for this message of liberation and open condemnation of patriarchy and this whole capitalist system, to puncture the stifling atmosphere of acceptance, and give young people who have a hunch that the way things are right now is UNACCEPTABLE, a vehicle through which to ACT and CHANGE the world!

To find out more about building the Liberation Generation, a new generation of youth ready and willing to STAND UP to END PATRIARCHY, the enslavement and degradation of women, contact: karlee.tiller@gmail.com

“Abortion is an issue that divides this country. This is no accident. How one thinks and feels about abortion flows fundamentally from how one views women.”

CLICK HERE to…

• Read the full statement for Abortion On Demand & Without Apology and sign on!
• Find out more about Stop Patriarchy’s Abortion Rights Freedom Ride across the country to the states where abortion is the most restricted!
• Make a donation to this raucous & righteous summer!
• JOIN US in turning the tide on the state-by-state stranglehold on abortion rights, and this whole war on women!

Forced Motherhood is Female Enslavement.

Fetuses are NOT babies.  Women are NOT incubators.  Abortion is NOT murder.

Abortion on Demand & Without Apology!  For EVERY woman in EVERY state, the reversal of abortion and birth control rights must stop NOW.

Stop Patriarchy! went to the 27th annual conference at Hampshire College, hosted by CLPP (Civil Liberties and Public Policy): “From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom” and on the second day, we were escorted out by police.

How did this happen??

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http://revcom.us/a/298/arkansas-law-biggest-assault-on-right-to-abortion-en.html

from Alex

Stop Patriarchy! Bay Area started our day on Saturday, January 26, at the Trust Women / Silver Ribbon Campaign’s ”Celebration of Women, Life, and Liberty,” a decisively non-confrontational commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

Our purpose was to call on every single person at that celebration to join us in directly CONFRONTING and RESISTING the thousands of anti-abortion activists — not even two miles away — who were mobilizing at that very moment to A) march against the basic right of women to have abortions, and B) rally people together under their patriarchal political agenda to overturn Roe v Wade.  

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Break the Silence ©2007-2013 ~AzFaka

I’ve been thinking lately about the charge that is eventually leveled against anyone that actively fights for women to be treated as human beings. “YOU HATE MEN!!”

Not true. But before I go all into defense mode…let me turn the question: Why is it that men hate women?

Look at the world we live in, and look, honestly, at what this world is like for women. Look at how many women are raped, the majority of the rapes carried out on women by men that they trust, friends even. One of the ones they thought was one of the “good guys.”

Look at how many women are beaten, again mostly by their so-called ‘partners’

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A woman holds a poster during a vigil in Dublin November 17, 2012, in memory of Savita Halappanavar and in support of changes to abortion law. 

WTF. WTF? REALLY??!! WTF!!!! This was my reaction…..increasing in anger and volume… to the news that Planned Parenthood is dropping the “label” of being pro-choice, under the idea that this term is too “divisive.” As I sifted through some articles online, I also read from one of them that Planned Parenthood is saying that they hope to move beyond any labels, and that the issue of abortion is “complicated.”

It must be said, this is not at all complicated!!!! This is a “divisive issue” not because of the pro-woman, pro-abortion side of this fight, but because there exists a fanatical anti-abortion

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By Sunsara Taylor

On Dec. 16, 2012 a 23-year-old medical student was kidnapped, repeatedly gang-raped and tortured on a bus in Delhi, India which had been taken over by six men. She was raped repeatedly, beaten viciously, and penetrated by a rusty iron rod which ruptured her internal organs. By the time her rapists dumped her naked body under an overpass, along with her male companion who had sustained broken bones and a severe beating, 95% of her intestines had been pulled out of her body. Her rapists attempted to run her over with the bus, but her companion managed to pull her out of the way. Still, her ordeal was not over. For nearly two hours, as blood poured from her body, medical treatment was delayed – first as passersby refused to stop and then as police delayed and debated over whose jurisdiction and responsibility she was. On December 29th, after 13 days of emergency surgeries and medical attention, she died.

On August 11, 2012, a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio passed out at a party. While she was unconscious, the stars of the local football team stripped her naked, raped her, and goaded party-goers into urinating on her while crowds looked on. They dragged the unconscious girl to three different parties, violating her throughout the night. In cellphone footage taken that night, one of the rapists can be seen laughing and joking about what he and others did to the girl. Referring to the fact that she was unresponsive as this assault went on, he jokes,“Is it really rape, cuz you don’t know if she wanted it or not. She might have wanted it. That might have been her final wish.” While this girl did not, in fact, die, a group of guys can be heard laughing as one of them goes on for a full twelve minutes saying things like, “She is deader than OJ Simpson’s wife,” and, “She is deader than Trayvon Martin.”

How different are these two stories, really? 

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Here’s a message sent to StopPatriarchy from Nikki who is coming to Washington DC for the Week of Action.  Read. Take a moment to think about what this means for women’s lives.  ACT. 

“Last year around this time a friend of mine bought the iPhone 4S, he was so excited about it and so was I. I wanted to play with Siri, the voice interpretation and recognition program that comes on that model and all subsequent models of the iPhone. The first thing I did, as a proud feminist, was to start talking to Siri about women’s issues. I asked Siri where the nearest abortion clinic was. Her response: 

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I Declare: We Have No More Time—or Women’s Lives—To Waste Before Making Revolution!

by Sunsara Taylor

Reprinted from Revolution newspaper #283 10/28/12

Every day we are told that women have achieved unprecedented equality in this “greatest of all possible countries.” Every day politicians point their fingers at the very real crimes against women in other countries to reinforce the idea that it is so much better here. Every day, the news media and the Democrats bombard us with the horrifically enslaving program of the Christian fascists and the Republican Party to attempt to get us to accept the deadly “status quo” of society’s treatment of women.

But let’s look at the reality of life for women in this so-called “best of all possible worlds.”

On October 21, in Brookfield, Wisconsin, a woman who had been physically abused and terrorized by her estranged husband, a woman who had repeatedly sought police protection and a restraining order, was hunted down at her job and shot dead by him. Not only that, but two other women were murdered by this man and at least four other women were shot and sent to the hospital.

In one morning, the lives of three women were extinguished. For years their families, their children, their loved ones will battle the sorrow and the rage of this loss. Their lives will be haunted by this cruel viciousness and they will never fill the holes left by the theft of these women’s lives.

Four other women were severely injured. For the rest of their lives, they will bear the trauma and the scars of having dared to go to a salon—whether for work or for relaxation—in a world where men feel entitled to murder and punish women with startling regularity. That they had no personal connection to the killer is of no consequence, their crime was simply being female in this world where men are trained to view women as disposable and worthy of punishment.

For everyone else who was present, this day will rival—if not overshadow—all the other memorable days of their lives (the birth of their children, their greatest achievement, etc.) as the one that leaves the most lasting impression. For the rest of their days, they will not only sense in their heads, but they will feel in their bones, the constant force of hatred and violence that rains down on women. The way that all of us are touched at every minute by this war, whether head-on as its primary targets or “merely” as its “collateral damage.”

And all throughout society, women everywhere have been cruelly reminded: you live in a society that has accepted violence and hatred against women as a constant and the murder of women as routine.

So, what was the response to this massacre by the ruling authorities in this “oh-so-greatest-of-all-possible-countries”? 

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from Abigail Lynn

[part of our growing collection of Stories from the War Zone]

I was 42 before it really, seriously dawned on me that my first sexual experience was an assault. Even now, in my late 50s, I cannot say that it was rape. Rape is what happens to others; this wasn’t “as bad.” Even as I write about it now I have to soften it, distinguish it from real pain, by calling it an assault.

It was 1970; I had just turned 15.

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