As the semester has come to a close, I decided to treat myself to a (cheap) deep tissue massage-- a college degree seems to equate more with debt than financial security, so I had to be wise in my search. I began my online search for "cheap massage in San Francisco" and came across links to sex parlors and sex trafficking in San Francisco.

I'm all too familiar with the continued prevalence of prostitution in the Bay Area. I was taught not to judge or be over critical of prostitutes since I knew women who were single mothers, struggling to pay the bills while the fathers of their children were incarcerated. I sometimes find myself trying to speak up for these women: do you really think these women enjoy selling their bodies?

Before Furgie switched gears and began singing about her "humps" and being "Clumsy," I had a deep appreciation for the Black Eyed Peas. A couple of years ago, BEP came out with the song, "Where is the Love?" One of the lines that struck me most was, "Overseas we try to stop terrorism, but we still got terrorists livin' here in the USA."

Jeremy Bearer-Friend, a YP4 Leadership Academy fellow currently with Justice Now, just posted to Feministing:

Prisons are bad for everyone--not just for the people in cages within them, not just for the children who have lost their parents to them, or the social programs who have their budgets cut because of them.

Prisons distract us from the root causes of violence and ultimately exacerbate the deeply entrenched challenges of racism, sexism and transphobia facing our communities.

 An entry by Allie Funk, cross-posted from http://www.GirlHeadQuarters.org

 *I feel the need to place a warning of sorts here, as the topic of this post involves a series of ads which are rather graphic and disturbing.*

Heather Mac Donald wrote a remarkably ignorant column in the LA Times on Sunday titled "What campus rape crisis?", in which she decides to project her own warped version of reality in order to deny the experiences of so many of our female peers who have experience sexual assault.

Few things excite me more than high school activism. And, thanks to the Britney’s little sister and the critically acclaimed film Juno, few things excite the mainstream media as much as teenage pregnancy. But, since Jamie Lynn is hardly your typical teen and (spoiler alert?) Juno conveniently ends after the birth scene, what happens to the other one million teens in the United States that get pregnant every year?

Dig, if you will, the picture: A ninth-grade boy wears a pink polo shirt to school. He's promptly called homophobic slurs and threatened with physical violence.

Word gets out to a couple of senior guys. You might assume they'd shrug it off or laugh, even if they didn't feel great about it.

Far from it.

Read more below.

This morning when I read the excellent article "Hillary in the Pillory", by Courtney Martin in the Christian Science Monitor,  http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0809/p09s02-coop.html, I reflected on how young women today still have to contend with many of the personal appearance issues that I did. Especially, it seems, those women who are pressing for social change in politics or advocacy.

The flap about Hillary's purported showing of cleavage started when Washington Post fashion columnist Robin Givhan posted the snarky "Hillary Clinton's Tentative Dip Into New Neckline Territory". http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/AR2007071902668.html?sub=AR
 It does not escape me that Givhan is a young-ish woman who

I like Hillary Rodham Clinton. I don't really understand why other people don't. Sure, she's made her share of mistakes; she's a politician that's what they do. It seems to me that people--particularly democrats and women--are much harder on Hillary than they are on her male counterparts. This is of course not new, it is still much more difficult for a women to gain and hold a position of power than it is for a man. Old gender stereotypes that describe women as "weak" and "emotional" still permeate our society.

Today was the kick-off event for the 'I STOP HATE': MSU United Initiative/ Campaign in the MSU Trustees boardroom. It is a student led initiative aimed at ending all forms of hate on campus; against racial hate, gendered hate, ethnic hate, etc. This, what we hope will become a movement, is the beginning of something huge on  MSU's campus.