What’s Current: CBC reporter Megan Batchelor files RCMP report after assault at music festival

Female reporter sexually assaulted on the job at Squamish Music Festival, told to “calm down” or maybe find another job on Twitter.

“When N.W.A.’s mega-hyped biopic Straight Outta Compton opens next Friday, the brutalized bodies of black women will be lost in the predictable stampede of media accolades.”

Catherine Nichols learned a lot about sexism by sending her book out under a man’s name.

On Amy Winehouse’s eating disorder and the role it played in her death:

There is a tacitly accepted set of rules that our culture follows when it comes to women in the spotlight. They are required to be thin.  They do not eat a normal diet and that in and of itself is seen as normal, not even dangerous. Disordered eating is so normalized in our culture, especially in celebrity culture, that few people even acknowledge that it’s not healthy, and very potentially fatal. Eating disorders fall in line with what society expects of a celebrity—we love thinness so much, yet we know we’re supposed to be repulsed by the means of achieving that thinness—it’s easier to scrutinize their lifestyle or their partying than ever examine the toll of staying under a certain weight.

Helen Lewis on the “listen to sex worker” mantra:

There is another problem with the current fashion for divining authority from personal experience. It forces disclosure. In the case of the Amnesty debate, there is an implicit demand that women must lay bare their personal sexual histories to gain the right to speak. (Oddly, men never seem to have to preface their thoughts with: “As a long-term punter, I believe…”) Not everyone who has sold sex wants to go public about it. Are those people not allowed to speak? Finally, prostitution is a public policy issue. We all live in a society in which sex is bought and sold and its existence has consequences for all of us. Demanding that the vast majority of us shut up is like telling renters they can have no opinion on the mortgage market or that atheists can’t complain about faith schools.

Meghan Murphy

Founder & Editor

Meghan Murphy is a freelance writer and journalist from Vancouver, BC. She has been podcasting and writing about feminism since 2010 and has published work in numerous national and international publications, including The Spectator, UnHerd, Quillette, the CBC, New Statesman, Vice, Al Jazeera, The Globe and Mail, and more. Meghan completed a Masters degree in the department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in 2012 and is now exiled in Mexico with her very photogenic dog.