The Gifts of Imperfection

By: Angela Mayah Solstice

I'm doing Dr Brené Brown The Gifts of Imperfection   E-Course from Oprah's Lifeclass. Per our first week assignment, I  am posting a Selfie with Brene's Perfection Pledge written on my hand! There is still one day left to join in if you'd like. Just click the link to find out more information here.

P.S.~

I found it so appropriate that I couldn't get my picture to rotate or edit!!

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Marianne Williamson Announces She's Running For Congress!

" For thirty years, I have worked up close and personally with people in crisis. I have found that when things are truly down, you have to do more than just fix something here and fix something there. You have to dig deep into yourself and ask yourself some serious questions -- about who you really are and what you're doing.
 

As I see it, the United States is a country in crisis. We won't get out of it just by fixing something here and fixing something there. We as a country now have to dig deep down and ask ourselves some serious questions -- who we are as a nation, and what we're doing.

I've longed to see that kind of conversation and that level of consciousness inform the leaders of our country. I have asked myself how I could foster that, and have decided that the best way I could do that would to be run for office myself."

Read More Here.

Via: http://marianneforcongress.com/

 

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New Ad Campaign Uses Popular Search Terms to Show How the World Really Feels About Women

Though women’s status across the world has improved over the last few decades, we’re still largely second-class citizens in comparison to men: we make less money, have more difficulty accessing education and affordable healthcare and face much more violence than our male counterparts.

To emphasize the extent of global gender inequality, UN Women–an arm of the U.N. that focuses on women’s issues–has created a powerful advertising campaign that uses data collected from Google on the most popular search terms. As it turns out, the most popular Google queries are indicative of entrenched sexist attitudes that still persist today.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/10/18/new-ad-campaign-uses-popular-search-terms-to-show-how-the-world-really-feels-about-women/#ixzz2iNpmPnIG

Via: Time.com

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Another Month, Another 50 Women Dead

 October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, but most people are in fact unaware. One reason is that Republicans in congress frittered away most of the month by closing the government and creating a manufactured crisis over the debt ceiling.

But the statistics on domestic violence and guns ought to get our attention. If October is like every other month, nearly 50 women in the U.S. will be murdered with a gun by an intimate partner -- overwhelmingly a husband or boyfriend. We've had so many mass shootings in places like Tucson, Aurora, Newtown, and the Navy Yard that it would be easy to conclude gun violence knows no gender. But that's not quite true.

Women are over three-and-a-half times more likely than men to be killed by an intimate partner. And a gun in a household with a history of domestic violence increases that risk by twenty fold. Stalkers also use guns to harm their victims -- and you guessed it -- more than 75 percent of those victims are female.

A few common sense changes in the law would make women safer. For starters, we need to close the loopholes on background checks for gun ownership. Right now, if you want a gun without submitting to a background check, just pick one up at a gun show or online. No problem -- no questions asked.

Read the full story here.

Via: www.Huffingtonpost.com/politics

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A lesson in cause and effect: Drunk women do not cause rape. Rapists cause rape. Lumping responsibility on the survivor helps rapists justify their actions to themselves, and helps them get away with it

The fight against rape culture feels like an uphill struggle. Our victories are largely incremental: tweaking the discourse a little here; changing a few hearts and minds there. Yet over the years we have achieved improvements, and I had thought that perhaps we were finally starting to see a shift in attitudes towards rape.

I was dismayed, then, when I saw an article published in Slate magazine which seems to undo much of the progress we had started to make. In her article, agony aunt Emily Yoffe argues that to prevent rape, young women need to stop getting drunk. I wondered at first whether this was an archive piece, run from the 1970s, but sadly it was not. Indeed, Yoffe seems to be under the impression that what she is saying in somehow novel rather than a trope so tired I had thought it almost dead.

Yoffe points to evidence that about 80 per cent of women at college who have been sexually assaulted had been drinking, and they are unlikely to report it to the police. The fact they had been drinking at the time was a source of guilt and shame. Yoffe concludes from this that young women ought to “take responsibility” and stop drinking in the hope that “their restraint trickles down to the men.” My interpretation is somewhat different: I think Yoffe might have got cause and effect the wrong way round.

Despite what Yoffe seems to think, she is not the first to suggest that women are somehow responsible for stopping themselves from getting raped. She says: “That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims.” To me, this is still called victim-blaming. It shifts responsibility from the perpetrator to the survivor. It entails undue focus on the survivor’s behaviour or attire. Survivors are often reluctant to report rape because of the belief that they brought it on themselves. Such victim-blaming beliefs have also been found to differentiate between men who were sexually coercive or aggressive and those who were not in one study. In other words, lumping responsibility on the survivor helps rapists justify their actions to themselves, and helps them get away with it.

Read the full story here.

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Via: http://www.independent.co.uk

Xerox's Ursula Burns wishes she would have had more kids

They talked about power and leadership. They shared advice and offered inspiration. Many of them also mentioned their kids, spouses, parents. At Fortune magazine's 15th annual Most Powerful Women Summit, attended by more than 450 professionals at the top of their fields, there were no sessions about how to balance the personal with the professional. The topic just became part of the conversation, sandwiched between discussions about government shutdowns, entrepreneurship and corporate boards.

Fortune senior editor Pattie Sellers, who has been covering heavy hitters in the corporate world for nearly 30 years, says that's what makes women so interesting to write about. Compared with men, "Women naturally think about their lives more holistically," she says. "Success for women tends to be broader."

Thursday, Ursula Burns, chairman and CEO of Xerox, acknowledged that if she could do it over again, she would "have more kids." Chelsea Clinton, vice chair of the Clinton Foundation, said one of her goals was "just to make sure my mom had this year to rest and relax." When introducing Yahoo President and CEO Marissa Mayer, Sellers noted that Mayer missed last year's summit because she was otherwise occupied — having a baby.

Speakers sounded similar themes. "Pick the place where you want to be great, and then relax," Burns said. Designer Tory Burch said being successful is "a lot about being patient, and waiting for a great opportunity."

 Read the full story here.

Via: USAToday.com 

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Shadow Town

The young girls of SHADOW TOWN...Genesis Salmanca, Kenesha Reed, Lindsey Scalise, Hisako Sugeta, Danielle Nicholas...talented cast

I will be volunteering tomorrow night October 17th and Saturday, October 19th, for the production of Shadow Town at the Her Story Theater. Shadow Town is a compelling play about sex trafficking here in Chicago.

Will you join me? I will be representing The Dream Catcher Foundationwhich is a non for profit organization that services girls ages 12 to 24 who are at risk or currently in Human trafficking. The proceeds from the ShadowTown performances will benefit The DreamCatcher Foundation along with the The Salvation Army- PROMISE program established Anne's House, which provides long term residential care for sex trafficked girls, ages 12-21.

There is a Q & A after each performance. Each performance has a different Chicago notable who performs the role of Samantha's parent, (Samantha is the child from Naperville who disappeared from a connection she made on the internet followed by her parents frantic search for her), along with a celebrity singer opening the show, followed by a reception where the singer performs for that night's audience in the comforts of the theaters lounge. Below is a full list of celebrity appearances:


October 18, 2013   MARTHA NUSSBAUM, law professor at University of Chicago, author
October 19, 2013   MARION BROOKS  NBC  5 Chicago, anchor and reporter
October 20, 2013   NATALIE WEST, famed for Rosanne Barr TV series, actor 
October 24, 2013   JAMES SHERMAN, award winning playwright
October 25, 2013   WILL CLINGER, Channel 11 Wild Chicago fame, actor and comedian
October 26, 2013   CEDRIC YOUNG, award winning actor for film and stage
October 27, 2013   THERESA GUTIERREZ, Emmy award winning journalist, ABC 7
October 31, 2013   ANITA ALVAREZ,  IL Cook County State's Attorney, advocate
November 1, 2013  Congresswoman JAN SCHAKOWSKY, U.S. House of Reps
November 2, 2013  CHERYL LYNN BRUCE, Award winning actress
November 3, 2013  VICKY CURTISS, Assoc. Pastor of Mission, 4th Presbyterian Church
November 7, 2013  SYLVIA EWING, WTTW, Channel 11, journalist
November 8, 2013  ERIC ZORN, Chicago Tribune Columnist, noted author
November 9, 2013  DENNIS ZACEK, Tony Award winner, founder Victory Gardens
November 10, 2013  JOEL DALY, award winning news anchor, lawyer and actor
November 14, 2013  BEN JORAVSKY, editorialist for The Reader, author Hoop Dreams
November 15, 2013  WARREN CHAPMAN, Senior Vice President, Columbia College
November 16, 2013  ALEX KOTLOWITZ, awarded author, There Are No Children Here.
November 17, 2013 Honorable VIRGINIA KENDALL, U.S. District Federal Judge 

You can buy your tickets by clicking here.

3 hours of free CEU credits are applicable to all 24 performances, complements of the Graduate School of Social Work at Dominican University.

Shadow Town in the media:
 

Via the Huffingtonpost.com:

"The plight of women in prostitution has always captured our attention. We've seen plenty of plays, movies and books written about and by women of the streets -- all usually through a dreamy vaseline lens.

Now comes to Chicago Shadow Town, a play by Mary Bonnett, artistic director of Her Story Theater, a theater for social change. Bonnett's production aims to blow the fog away to reveal a bracing portrait of an ugly world forced upon innocents, some 11 years old or younger."

Read the full story here.

Via nwitimes.com:
 
"I first heard about human trafficking 25 years ago, while working on a documentary about kids in Uptown, a poor Chicago neighborhood. When I asked a young mother about her kids, she said, "The oldest is gone. She was only twelve. They shoved her in a car and took her away. White slavery, that's what it is."

What? I didn't know how to prove or disprove this. My documentary was about something else, so I filed it under "Things I Don't Understand."

"We're taking a closer look on who these women are," Lake County Sheriff John Buncich recently said. "They are not just prostitutes on the street. They came from somewhere, they belong to someone. There's a story behind these girls."

Mary Bonnett, a 60-something Chicago writer and producer, artistic director of Her Story Theater, is telling some of those stories now.

Bonnett spent close to two years interviewing dozens of people connected to sex trafficking including undercover detectives, caseworkers, FBI, vice squad, parents, pimps, therapists, and trafficked girls and young women of Chicago.

She wrote and is producing a play, Shadow Town, featuring four girls’ journeys into ‘the life.’ The little girl I remember from Uptown could be one of them. But she's probably dead. According to the American Journal of Epidemiology, the average lifespan of someone in prostitution is 34, with violence and drugs the predominant causes of death."

Read the full story here.

Via Timeoutchicago.com :

"But with a production as interwoven with a cause as this one, the acting isn’t nearly as important as the brutal subject itself. Proceeds from the play benefit The Salvation Army PROMISE program and its residential care facility, Anne's House, as well as the Dreamcatcher Foundation; local experts who work with sex trafficking victims are on hand for a Q&A after each performance; and a rotating roster of different Chicago musicians and notables—from news anchors to state’s attorneys—take on two guest roles each night, generating even more buzz about an oft-overlooked issue that deserves the long, hard examination it gets here. It’s an effective approach, to say the least."

Read the full story here.

Read more media coverage on the following links:

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-10-06/news/ct-met-trice-sex-trafficking-1007-20131007_1_brenda-myers-powell-chicago-pimps-dreamcatcher-foundation 

http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2013/09/doing-my-part.html

http://newcitystage.com/2013/10/08/shining-light-into-the-shadows-her-story-theater-exposes-sex-trafficking-in-chicago/

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