Virginity Testing is Just Stupid

And I can add, evil as well. My half of the human race, the male half, can sometimes be alarmingly stupid, ignorant and malicious. Pushing around young girls looking for some bizarre concept of purity is the ultimate bullying and we should know better. We might do better trying to live our lives as gentlemen and worrying less about women’s sexuality.

There is no way that taking money for testing a woman’s virginity to determine her purity is ethical in business or otherwise. It never will be. Doesn’t basic business ethics imply that you are doing something useful, something beneficial in a sense? What’s useful about testing for virginity?

The Virginity Hit (Photo credit: Wikipedia)**Where would you get that out of this?**

James Pilant

The invasive, sexist practice of “testing” girls’ virginity – Salon.com

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/14/the_invasive_sexist_practice_of_testing_girls_virginity/

Aside from the primary fact that a virginity test is evil and invasive, it’s not even accurate – as any teenager who’s ever gone horseback riding or read the instructions in a box of tampons could tell you. As ethicist and researcher Marie-Ève Bouthillier told the Gazette, to assume so “reduces virginity to a piece of skin.” Claire Faucher, an assistant clinical professor at the Université de Montréal, says that the World Health Organization considers virginity testing sexual violence against women. And Amnesty International calls it “sexual violence… akin to rape.”In far too many places in this world, a girl’s virginity is so highly prized her community is willing to sexually abuse her to try to confirm it. And though an official statement on the ethics of the practice may help curb it in some areas, it’s clear from its persistence in places where it’s not supposed to exist that it takes a lot more than saying it’s wrong to stop it. As Bouthillier notes, testing is easy to perpetuate “because it’s a taboo practice and it’s hidden.” That’s why more education and enlightenment and protections for girls need to be a serious priority in the healthcare profession, all over the world. Healthcare providers need …

via The invasive, sexist practice of “testing” girls’ virginity – Salon.com.

From around the web.

From the web site,

http://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2013/09/22/before-melanie-phillips-was-mad-her-role-in-uncovering-the-virginity-testing-controversy/

But I thought I’d mention that before Melanie Phillips became ‘Mad Mel’, she was a social affairs journalist for The Guardian and broke the ‘virginity testing’ story for the newspaper in 1979, as seen in this archival piece from The Guardian‘s
website. The ‘virginity testing’ controversy centred around the
gynaecological examination of a South Asian women at Heathrow when she
tried to enter the country on a fiancee visa, and soon led to a
widespread investigation into racially discriminatory practices within
the UK immigration control system (you can find out more about our
research into this here).

It is bizarre how the investigative journalist who broke this story
in 1979 has become the right-wing columnist that we know (and don’t
love) today. I wonder what she would write if the ‘virginity testing’
story broke now…

George Orwell Would Laugh

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/23/orwell-nsa-surveillance-alan-rusbridger

NSA surveillance goes beyond Orwell’s imagination – Alan Rusbridger

Guardian editor says depth of NSA surveillance programs greatly exceed anything the 1984 author could have imagined

The seal of the U.S. National Security Agency.... — The seal of the U.S. National Security Agency. The first use was in September 1966, replacing an older seal which was used briefly. For more information, see here and here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The potential of the surveillance state goes way beyond anything in George Orwell‘s 1984, Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian‘s editor-in-chief, told an audience in New York on Monday.

Speaking in the wake of a series of revelations in the Guardian about the extent of the National Security Agency’s surveillance operations, Rusbridger said: “Orwell could never have imagined anything as complete as this, this concept of scooping up everything all the time.

“This is something potentially astonishing about how life could be lived and the limitations on human freedom,” he said.

Rusbridger said the NSA stories were “clearly” not a story about totalitarianism, but that an infrastructure had been created that could be dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands.

“Obama is a nice guy. David Cameron is a nice social Democrat. About three hours from London in Greece there are some very nasty political parties. What there is is the infrastructure for total surveillance. In history, all the precedents are unhappy,” said Rusbridger, speaking at the Advertising Week conference.

I heartily share Alan Rubbridger’s concern about later governments. The possibilities for abuse are so incredible that it is difficult to wrap your mind around them.

But what about Business Ethics? What are the implications there?

The government is tracking all financial transactions, so they know who invests, in what and for how much in any and every American business. That’s power. Since they monitor all e-mails, they have every kind of inside information including promotion and firing decisions. They can do something no government has been able to do before: understand the inner workings of a corporation in detail and in real time. Since corporations have incredible power, this check to that power’s implications are hard to measure. But we could be on the edge of an era in which government management of data enables corporations both domestic and foreign to be brought to heel.

Of course, they know enough personal information to blackmail millions, discredit millions more and by implication of knowing silence tens of millions of others. I find these implications disturbing.

It may be that Obama will not abuse this power but where is the guarantee for those who will come in the future?

James Pilant

From around the web.

From the web site, Tech Crunch.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/03/wordpress-org-reddit-mozilla-others-will-participate-in-anti-nsa-web-protests-on-july-4th/

From July 3rd, 2013.

A number of high-profile websites will be taking part in an online protest tomorrow against the National Security Agency (NSA)’s surveillance of online activity and phone calls. The protest is organized by non-profit organization Fight for the Future, and will see participation from thousands of sites, including WordPress.org, Namecheap, Reddit, 4chan, Mozilla, Fark, TOR, Cheezburger, Demand Progress, MoveOn, and EFF, among others.

However, none of the tech companies – like Facebook or Google – whose cooperation with the NSA was outed in the PRISM reveal will be involved in tomorrow’s events.