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13 Reasons Why is being devoured by teenagers. We must understand why | Nancy Jo Sales | Opinion | The Guardian

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13 Reasons Why is being devoured by teenagers. We must understand why | Nancy Jo Sales | Opinion | The Guardian

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"Guys talk at our school and they do shit," says Jessica, a character on the controversial new Netflix series 13 Reasons Why. "They do things to girls that no one ever talks about and no one ever does anything about." "Like what?" asks an adult. "Like what do you think?" Jessica says ruefully.

Yes, like what? 13 Reasons Why is about misogyny, rape culture, casual sexism and the kinds of things that go on in the lives of girls, but "no one ever does anything about" - or is even willing to acknowledge, much less discuss. It has been interesting to see, in the firestorm of debate that has followed the show, so much emphasis being placed on the series' graphic depiction of the main character's suicide, yet so little attention paid to those "13 reasons why" she actually decides to end her life.

Hannah Baker is raped. She witnesses her friend Jessica being raped by the same boy. Prior to this, Hannah is photographed during a make-out session - a photo of a private moment which is then non-consensually shared by the boys on the basketball team at her school. After that, she becomes known as a "slut".

She is put on a "Hot List" and described as having the school's "best ass" - something boys tell her she should be proud of. Her behind is grabbed in public. When she goes to tell her school counselor about her rape and she refuses to name the boy, he tells her that without a name he can't report the crime, and counsels her to just get over it.

Is any of this uncommon? Over the top? Unfortunately, no.

Over two and a half years, talking to more than 200 girls for my book American Girls, I heard story after story that echo Hannah's experience - stories of cyberbullying and sexual assault, of sexual harassment on and offline, of anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation caused by abuses stemming from what can only be described as sexism.

Girls in Los Angeles told me about a girl whose naked image was screenshotted by a boy who then non-consensually shared the photo with "the entire baseball team". "He still has it and won't delete it," said the girl in my book. There is ample evidence to support the verity of the stories of these girls, research charting a precipitous rise in cyberbullying, sexual harassment, sexual assault and, yes, suicide in recent years.

And while there are many wonderful school counselors and administrators who do their best to help kids in trouble, there is also an extensive body of reporting on how institutions fail girls and young women when they try to report sexual assault. "It's reality," said a girl in a post on Seventeen.com about girls' reactions to 13 Reasons Why. "And the people that don't like it are super clueless to what high school and middle school are like."

Is the show appropriate for middle schoolers to watch? In my view, no. As a parent myself, I don't think it would be advisable for anyone under the age of 16 to see the show, especially without an adult on hand to discuss it. But both high schoolers and middle schoolers are watching 13 Reasons Why.

At a middle school in New Jersey last week, when I asked an auditorium full of nearly 600 seventh and eighth graders whether they had seen it, almost every hand went up - something which surprised the principal and teachers.

Schools around the country have been issuing advisories warning parents not to allow their children see the show, for fear that it could trigger vulnerable kids and inspire them to commit copycat suicides.

And while I think that such concern is valid, I also think we are missing an opportunity in centering the discussion on Hannah's suicide alone. If we talk to kids about this show, we need to talk to them about the experiences that led up to her suicide. We need to talk to them about misogyny. Because girls are having experiences that no one is talking to them about, and all of us - both boys and girls, as well as adults - are implicated.

For 13 Reasons Why is not only about misogyny, it is about having accountability for misogyny. "It has to get better, the way we treat each other and look out for each other; it has to get better somehow," says Hannah's friend Clay, in the last episode of the show. It will only get better by recognizing what girls go through, and having frank discussions about what we can all do to change our behavior, our attitudes and our culture, so that they won't have to go through such things anymore.

I dedicated American Girls to my friend Alyson, who took her own life in 2014. Although she was in her thirties, I believe her suicide was provoked in part by experiences that were very similar to those of the girls in my book, and to Hannah's. Every day I ask myself: what more could I have done to help her?

13 Reasons Why is about those of us who are left behind, and how we wish we had done more to be there for a young woman in pain. There is much we can do, starting with listening to girls, hearing them and seeing the world they live in.

In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.

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13 Reasons Why is being devoured by teenagers. We must understand why | Nancy Jo Sales

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"Guys talk at our school and they do shit," says Jessica, a character on the controversial new Netflix series 13 Reasons Why. "They do things to girls that no one ever talks about and no one ever does anything about." "Like what?" asks an adult. "Like what do you think?"

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Florence Finch, Unsung War Hero Who Took On Japanese, Dies at 101 - The New York Times

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Florence Finch, Unsung War Hero Who Took On Japanese, Dies at 101 - The New York Times

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It was perhaps reflective of that modesty that when she died on Dec. 8 at 101 in an Ithaca nursing home, the news did not travel widely. Newspapers in central New York carried a brief obituary, but her death went unreported virtually everywhere else.

It was only after the announcement by the Coast Guard on Thursday that she would be buried with full military honors on Saturday at Pleasant Grove Cemetery in Cayuga Heights, N.Y., that word of her death spread nationwide.

Indeed, the almost five-month delay in her memorial owed something to Mrs. Finch's solicitous nature. Near death, she had made it clear that she did not want her funeral to disrupt her relatives' Christmas holidays or to make mourners travel during a dark and icy Southern Tier winter. (Besides, she relished the annual resurgence wrought by spring.)

So it was put off. The funeral is to be held in Ithaca, with the military honors coming afterward, a ceremony befitting this Philippine-born daughter of an American father and Filipino mother - one who, in 1947, received the Medal of Freedom (the forerunner of today's Presidential Medal of Freedom), the nation's highest award to a civilian.

When the Japanese occupied the Philippines from 1942 to 1945, Mrs. Finch posed as a Filipino, but she became a United States citizen after the war. "Because she was over 18, she could have chosen to be American or Filipino," Ms. Murphy said. "When the Japanese landed, she chose to be mum, but in her heart she had chosen to be an American."

Mrs. Finch was born Loring May Ebersole on Oct. 11, 1915, in Santiago, on Luzon Island in the northern Philippines. (It is unclear how her first name became Florence.) Her father, Charles, had fought in the Philippines for the Army during the Spanish-American War and remained there after it was over. Her mother was the former Maria Hermosa.

Betty, as Mrs. Finch was known all her life, graduated from high school and was hired as a stenographer at Army Intelligence headquarters in Manila under Maj. E. C. Engelhart. While working there, she met Charles E. Smith, a Navy chief electrician's mate. They married in August 1941, a few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7.

When the war did begin, Mr. Smith reported to his PT boat. He died on Feb. 8, 1942, trying to resupply American and Filipino troops trapped on Corregidor Island and the Bataan Peninsula.

Five weeks earlier, Manila had fallen to the Japanese.

Mrs. Finch (then Mrs. Smith) convinced the occupying forces that she was Filipino and, armed with superior penmanship, wangled a job writing gas rationing vouchers for the now Japanese-run Philippine Liquid Fuel Distributing Union.

Unbeknown to her employer, however, she was actually collaborating with the Philippine resistance movement. Her job enabled her to divert precious fuel supplies to the underground and help sabotage shipments to the Japanese. After she learned of her husband's death, her efforts became even more vigorous. (She was honored by the Philippine government in 2011.)

Meanwhile, Major Englehart (he became a lieutenant colonel) managed to get word to her that he had been captured and that he and fellow war prisoners were being maltreated. She helped smuggle food, medicine, soap and clothing to them in a prison until she was caught.

Confined to a two-by-four-foot cell, she was interrogated and then tortured, enduring repeated shocks from electrical clamps on her fingers. She never talked. She was tried and sentenced to three years' hard labor at the Women's Correctional Institution in Mandaluyong, just outside Manila.

When she was finally freed by American troops on Feb. 10, 1945, she weighed 80 pounds.

Rather than remain in her native country, she moved to Buffalo, where her father's sister lived. She joined the Coast Guard Women's Reserve, or the SPARs (a contraction of the Coast Guard motto "Semper Paratus" - Always Ready). She enlisted, she said, to avenge her husband.

When her superiors learned of her wartime exploits, she was awarded the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Ribbon; the Coast Guard described her as the first woman to receive the decoration. The Medal of Freedom was bestowed for meritorious service.

After the war ended, she was discharged as a seaman second class in 1946 and enrolled in secretarial school in New York City, where she met and married an Army veteran, Robert Finch. A chemist, he was hired by Agway, the agricultural products supplier, and moved the family to Ithaca.

Mr. Finch died in 1968. In addition to her daughter, Betty, Mrs. Finch is survived by a son, Bob; a sister, Olive Keats; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

As Mrs. Finch was rearing her children and working as a secretary at Cornell University, her neighbors never suspected that they were in the presence of a war hero.

In the early 1990s, though, she was rediscovered by the military after she completed a government questionnaire that she had received in conjunction with plans to erect the Women in Military Service for America Memorial in Washington. The Coast Guard named a building on Sand Island in Hawaii in her honor in 1995.

Ms. Murphy decided to alert the news media about the building dedication, noting that her mother would be in attendance.

"It was the first anyone knew," Ms. Murphy said. "I figured it was time. And when she came home and people met her at the bus station, she was flabbergasted."

In 2015, the Coast Guard's official blog said of Mrs. Finch, "Of the thousands of women who have served with honor in the United States Coast Guard, one stands out for her bravery and devotion to duty."

Her wartime legacy will be publicly honored again on Saturday by a military honor guard. But privately her heroism endured without medals, plaques or flags.

"It had not defined her," Ms. Murphy said, "but it defined how she lived her life."

Correction: April 28, 2017

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Florence Finch, Unsung War Hero Who Took On Japanese, Dies at 101

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It was perhaps reflective of that modesty that when she died on Dec. 8 at 101 in an Ithaca nursing home, the news did not travel widely. Newspapers in central New York carried a brief obituary, but her death went unreported virtually everywhere else.

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(4) We should all be feminists | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | TEDxEuston - YouTube

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(4) We should all be feminists | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | TEDxEuston - YouTube

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We should all be feminists | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | TEDxEuston

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(4) Empowering women speech by Michelle Obama - YouTube

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(4) Empowering women speech by Michelle Obama - YouTube

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Empowering women speech by Michelle Obama

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Is Emma Watson anti-feminist for exposing her breasts? - BBC News

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Is Emma Watson anti-feminist for exposing her breasts? - BBC News

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Emma Watson's decision to expose part of her breasts in a Vanity Fair photoshoot has sparked a fierce debate on social media about what it means to be a feminist.

"She complains that women are sexualised and then sexualises herself in her own work. Hypocrisy," said radio presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer on Twitter.

Watson said she was "confused" by accusations she is "anti-feminist" and there was a real "misunderstanding" about what it actually means.

So can you bare your breasts and still be a feminist?

"Emma Watson has done more for women and for young girls than most of us put together," says Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for gender equality and women's rights.

"So I don't really see that just because she's made that decision, any of us should be criticising her.

"She's an empowered woman who is posing for a very tasteful image. She's not being exploited, she doing it in a controlling position. It's a positive use of her body."

Sexist News, the team behind the campaign for the Sun to stop using topless models on Page 3, said it loved that the former Harry Potter star was "exploring and championing feminism having grown up in the public eye".

It believes the row created by the photoshoot is "daft", adding: "It is not a debate that we have about men's fashion shoots, regardless of the amounts of nipple-grazing crochet they wear.

"While no woman gets to dress herself outside of our society's patriarchal bubble, this example just shows that someone like Emma Watson is going to face an even more impossible standard than many other women."

Victoria Jenkinson, 20, a member of Girlguiding, believes the shoot has been used as a opportunity to "stir up a frenzy" around Watson and "undermine" her work promoting women's rights.

"The shoot doesn't suggest hypocrisy nor does it undermine her work as a feminist and we as women should be united in our fight for equality more than ever before," she said.

"I don't understand why people have an idea they can tell a woman what she can and can't do and I agree with Emma that critics have missed the point.

"A woman should be able to choose what she wants to do. This is what feminism is all about in 2017."

But Dr Finn Mackay, a feminism researcher at the University of West England, rejects the view that feminism is about giving women "choice" and says it is a social justice movement.

"Emma's saying feminism is about choice and the choice to do whatever you want, but that's a nonsense," she says.

"Some women choose terrible things, some women choose to work for parties that deny women access to abortion, access to healthcare or mothers access to welfare."

However, she does not believe that Watson's pose for Vanity Fair means she is not a feminist.

"If she self identifies as a feminist and believes in promoting women's rights, her doing her job doesn't necessarily have to undermine that.

"I think if she's trying to say being in a photoshoot and getting your breast out is a feminist act, that's a different matter."

But Dr Mackay believes promoting feminism is more effective through the voice and not the body.

"The most radical thing that women can do in this culture is keep their clothes on and open their mouths and make political points," she says.

The controversy surrounding Watson's magazine shoot has brought into question what it means to be a feminist.

But equality groups and feminists say the debate should be focused on female objectification and inequality.

'Dig at feminism'

Ms Smethers says: "The real issue about all of this is the pressure on young women to look a certain way, to be judged on their appearance so if we are going to focus on anything that's what I would be more concerned to be prioritised."

Dr Mackay questions why the debate has been reduced to a celebrity exposing her breasts rather than issues such as women's economic positions and cuts to women's services.

"A Hollywood celebrity flashing a bit of boob is really the least of my worries," she says.

"It's interesting that people only speak about it now and their real motivation seems to be to want to have a dig at feminism rather than to talk about the overall problems Hollywood has with objectifying women."

Sexist News adds: "We really need to examine why on earth this one fashion image has caused such outrage. This is not to say that images of fashion or celebrity are unproblematic, quite the contrary.

"As ever the focus is on what a woman should or shouldn't be doing and not on how our culture presents, polices and consumes women's bodies and condemns their actions.

"We need to challenge these things, not the individual women stuck in the system."
Are you a feminist? Has someone challenged whether you are a feminist because of something you've said, done or worn? Tell us about your experiences. Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk with your stories.
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Is Emma Watson anti-feminist for exposing her breasts? - BBC News

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Emma Watson's decision to expose part of her breasts in a Vanity Fair photoshoot has sparked a fierce debate on social media about what it means to be a feminist. "She complains that women are sexualised and then sexualises herself in her own work. Hypocrisy," said radio presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer on Twitter.

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EDpuzzle video lesson. Make any video your lesson. Take a video and crop it, add your voice or embed questions at any point.

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ANGELA CARTER, The Werewolf, the whole story.pdf - Google Drive

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ANGELA CARTER, The Werewolf, the whole story.pdf - Google Drive

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ANGELA CARTER, The Werewolf, the whole story.pdf

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Original poster by J. Howard Miller for Westinghouse in 1942

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Norman Rockwell, 1943, Cover of the Saturday Evening Post

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Rosie The Riveter by The Four Vagabonds - YouTube

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Rosie The Riveter by The Four Vagabonds - YouTube

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Rosie the Riveter | The Saturday Evening Post

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Rosie the Riveter | The Saturday Evening Post

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On the evening of June 6, 1994, the 50-year anniversary of D-Day, Jay Leno did a special tribute on The Tonight Show. He introduced several World War II veterans who were sitting in the audience before he presented his next guest, Mary Doyle Keefe. Mary was the model for Rockwell's May 29, 1943, cover Rosie the Riveter. As Vicki Randle, a member of The Tonight Show band, sang the song "Rosie the Riveter," Mary drilled several screws into a board making the drill sound at the end of the song.

Mary was a 19-year-old phone operator in Arlington, Vermont, when Rockwell called and asked if she "wouldn't mind posing for a painting." She posed twice because the white blouse and shoes for the first sitting were not what he was looking for. Mary explains that yes, she did hold a ham sandwich while posing; she did have the white handkerchief that peeked from a pocket; she never saw Hitler's book Mein Kampf; and the rivet gun was a lightweight fake. "I've had people come to me and say, 'How did you ever hold that rivet machine?' 'Oh,' I said, 'it wasn't too bad.'" Rockwell had transformed the petite, 110-pound Mary into a brawny, muscular woman for the painting. She says, "He called me and apologized for making me so large."

During the war, Rosie the Riveter and Rockwell's Four Freedoms toured the country raising money for the war bond drive. "I was very pleased that they could make all this money for the war." She adds, "I am proud of this painting. It's a symbol of what the women did for the war, to do their part, and to give up their nail polish."

Mary was also a special guest at Sotheby's when they auctioned Rosie the Riveter on May 23, 2002. The painting sold for $4.9 million to the Elliot Yeary Gallery in Colorado, and has since been sold to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas.

Even today, Mary autographs Rosie the Riveter posters for people, and happily reminisces about the time she danced with Leno on The Tonight Show.

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Mary Doyle Keefe was a 19-year-old phone operator in Arlington, Vermont, when Rockwell called and asked if she wouldn't mind posing for the soon-to-be iconic cover. Read the Post's 2013 interview with Mary, who passed away this week at age 92.