feminist blogs

(Via Google News.)

Another woman in northern Ohio has come forward about an unnecessary and sexually humiliating strip search by the Stark County sheriff’s office. She is the sixth woman who has come forward about the Stark County sheriff’s office in the past four months. Like four other women, she came forward after learning about Hope Steffey’s gang-rape search at the hands of male and female deputies, and her lawsuit against the sheriff’s office. Elizabeth is afraid for her own safety and the safety of her family, so she has chosen not to use her last name or reveal her face in press interviews. She says that she never gave any indication of being suicidal, believes that she was stripped and left naked in her cell as retaliation for physically defending herself against a deputy who had laid his hand on her hip and made sexual jokes at her expense.

STARK COUNTY — A Stark County woman told Channel 3 News Investigator Tom Meyer that she was told to remove all her clothes inside the Stark County Jail after deputies made several off-color remarks.

Elizabeth fears reprisals for speaking out so she prefers we not use her last name.

She says a Stark County Sheriff’s deputy pulled her over one night for failing to signal during a lane change. Elizabeth says she had to undergo a field sobriety test. According to the officer’s incident report, she failed some aspects of the test. She was arrested for driving under the influence and taken to the station for further testing.

She was told to blow into a breathylyzer, but she suffers from asthma. When she failed to produce enough air, she says a deputy told her, Baby we both know you can blow harder than that. She says a second deputy laughed. The officer marked her as a refusal for not blowing harder.

Elizabeth decided to tell her story when she saw video of Hope Steffey strip searched by both male and female deputies. Steffey was left naked in a cell for 6 hours.

When Elizabeth was told to remove all her clothes, she did so voluntarily saying she worked at a medium security prison in Ohio and knew her clothes would be forcibly removed if she failed to obey.

The incident report says Elizabeth wanted to commit suicide. But she says that’s just not true. I’ve never been suicidal. I’m not suicidal. I was terrified, she told the Investigator. The Sheriff’s office said medical personnel decide if an inmate should be placed on suicide watch, not sheriff deputies.

Elizabeth was charged with drinking and driving, and assault for kicking a deputy. She decided to defend herself when a deputy placed his hands on her hips. She explained that she had been the victim of a sexual assault while employed at the prison.

The assault charge in the Stark County case was dropped on the condition she plead guilty to operating a vehicle while intoxicated. She reluctantly took the deal.

—Tom Meyer, WKYC News (2008-05-02): Investigator Exclusive: Strip search case prompts 5th woman to come forward

According to the local news video about Elizabeth (trigger warning: contains video of Hope Steffey being forcibly strip searched by male officers), Elizabeth was left locked in her cell, completely naked, for eight hours.

Lawyer David Malik says we’re seeing a pattern where apparently every woman who cries or gets emotional is deemed suicidal.

—Tom Meyer, WKYC 3 News (2008-02-29/2008-03-06): Strip Search: Four more women come forward with similar stories

And remember, if you are deemed suicidal, government cops and government jailers will take it for granted that the best way for armed Trained Professionals to handle the situation is to hurt you, hold you down, strip you against your will, subject you to an invasive search, and lock you in a cage and leave you there, naked, for six or eight hours at a stretch.

There is absolutely no conceivable excuse for treating anyone this way, ever. Whether man or woman, calm or belligerent, nice or nasty, crazy or sane. This is gang rape, professionalized and excused by Official Procedures. What is becoming clear is that Sheriff Tim Swanson and his goon squad not only have convinced themselves that this kind of brutality is sometimes acceptable, but also that they have an especially broad understanding of the sort of situation that calls for it, and that they are especially willing to use it as a form of humiliating retaliation, in order to teach uppity or unruly women a lesson, under color of the law. And then, to crown all, to further insult the victim by proclaiming that they did it all For Her Own Good. The Stark County sherriff’s office are nothing more and nothing less than a pack of dangerous sexual predators, and their uniforms and badges don’t make them any better than any other gang of serial rapists.

More on the Stark County, Ohio sheriff’s department and Hope Steffey:

• GT 2008-03-08: In Their Own Words: Just following orders edition
• GT 2008-03-07: Rapists in uniform #2: four more women come forward
• GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform

See also:

• GT 2008-03-10: Rapists on patrol (#2)
• GT 2008-02-26: Cops are here to protect you. (#2)
• GT 2007-12-21: Rapists on patrol
• GT 2007-12-02: Men in uniform

Wil Wheaton has a post on his blog entitled “Hillary Clinton: the psycho ex-girlfriend of the democratic party,” and there’s really nothing more you need than the title to understand what the post is about.

I’ve seen altogether too much of this from Obama supporters; not just sexism, but also bitter derision and gloating.¹

My message to Obama supporters such as Wheaton: Stop it. If you’re so sure Obama has won, then it’s time to start acting like smart winners. We can’t win in November without the nearly 50% of Democrats who prefer Clinton to Obama, and every unnecessary word you write that dismisses, alienates or otherwise pisses off Clinton’s supporters is a word that helps John McCain win in November.

I’m not saying to keep silent regarding substantive disagreements, but if all you’ve got is sexist jokes and sneering mockery, then do Barack Obama a favor and shut the hell up.

Wheaton ends his post with this:

And allow me to just head something off right now that’s already come up on Twitter: I’m not sexist. This isn’t sexist. That’s a stupid straw man, and if you try to make that claim, I will point and laugh at you.

This so annoyed me I was going to leave a comment — but then I read the comments, and this response from Backpacking Dad had already said it perfectly:

Is it not sexist because it’s mysogynistic instead?

Is it not sexist because it’s funny?

Is it not sexist because it’s a metaphor that speaks to you?

So. Those were all questions. Here is a statement:

“Dude. You don’t get to decide what’s sexist.”

Here’s a reason to think that it MIGHT be sexist. You can g’an and point and laugh, but I’ll take this seriously for a second just to see where it goes:

The metaphor evokes a trope in sexual politics, that of the irrational girl who cannot accept that a relationship is over. Labeling, categorizing, pigeon-holing someone in this way “he’s a geek, she’s a slut, he’s a pig, she’s cow” is at once appealing to a fragment of truth, and also making the target controllable.

If they are controllable, they are marginalizable. And they can be dismissed. The problem with controlling and dismissing Hillary using a trope from sexual politics is that it moves her from the realm of discourse and debate into the realm of sex (as in “getting it on”). And labeling her as batshit crazy in an ex-girlfriend sense means that she is not only sexualized, but her sexuality can be controlled.

And that’s the heart and soul of sexism.

But I can understand if you didn’t really want to engage anyone on this. It is a funny piece, and sometimes maybe we want to hang on to the things we like even though someone else might think they’re inappropriate.

UPDATE:

According to U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Memphis, she may be starting to more closely resemble another famous movie character: The psycho lady played by Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction.”

When asked about whether Clinton should drop out of the race on Fox 13’s “Good Morning Memphis” program today, Cohen said: “Glenn Close should have stayed in that tub.”

Rep. Cohen, would you please GET THE FUCK OFF MY SIDE!!!

(Curtsy: Talk Left.)

1. And yes, I’ve seen plenty of bitter derision from Clinton’s supporters for us “Obamabots,” as they charmingly call us, but that’s not the subject of this post.

VERY STRONG TRIGGER WARNING

The story of Romona Moore’s murder is horrific, not only because of the terrifying brutality involved, but because of the terrifying apathy that allowed it to occur. Moore is dead because she and those who tried to help her were ignored. It’s a really shitty consolation, but the very least we can do, to pay attention now. If you think your mental health can handle it, I urge you to please read the full story.

You know, I’m one of those feminists who thinks that racism is indeed a feminist issue, just like poverty, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and much more are feminist issues, simply because these are factors that oppress women on a daily basis and prevent them from living lives freely, safely and to their full potential. I’m sad that so many seem to disagree — but even if you do disagree on the basis outlined above, I don’t know how anyone could read Romona Moore’s story and not see how racism is a feminist issue, when racism is allowing and assisting the unspeakably violent rape, torture and murder of black women. As for the lawsuit, I hope like hell that her mother wins it.

The failure of authorities to care about the unexplained disappearance of a black woman is not an isolated incident. Not by a long shot. And neither is average people failing to do the right thing when given the chance.

All that is needed for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

There are many reasons that people do nothing, and sometimes they are justified. It may be believed (often very rightly) that doing the “right thing” will result in more violence or more severe consequences than turning a blind eye. Sometimes one’s own life is on the line. But I don’t see that this was the case here, either for the police officers that refused to even open an investigation, or for the man — probably numerous men — who saw Moore after she had been tortured raped and was probably about half-dead, and did nothing. Not even an anonymous phone call . . . that is, not before it was too late.

I read stories like these, and I find myself wondering where the hell the good people who do something are. And sometimes I wonder how “good” we can really call the people to do nothing. SAFER has an excellent post about bystander training and learning to be the person who does something. Despite our hunches and hopes for ourselves, I don’t think that any of us truly know if we are that person until put in the position. But at the very least, I want to believe that we can learn from the fatal mistakes of others.

Story via What About Our Daughters?

This is a global distributional issue. This is about getting enough to eat. (I make no claim to originality here: several women* are writing on this issue right now.)

Women are roughly 50% of the world’s population, do two thirds of the work, but earn 10% of the income and control just 1% of the world’s wealth.

The price of food everywhere is going up. The major rises in agricultural yield came about because of mechanization and petrochemical fertilizers, both of which become more expensive when energy prices go up. Worse, politically attractive but resource-stupid forays into ethanol have pushed the prices of some food crops higher.

The New York Times this week said that in Peru, women urge action on food prices:

More than 1,000 women protested outside Peru’s Congress on Wednesday, banging empty pots and pans to demand that the government do more to counter rising food prices, which are squeezing the poor worldwide.

The women, some toting small children on their hips, run food kitchens, known as eating halls, for the poor.

… the women say they are struggling to provide enough food and want the government to increase financial aid so they can cover their costs.

Hundreds of thousands of people rely on the eating halls each day in Peru, where about 12 million people, or 42 percent of the population, live in poverty.

The rising cost for basic foods sank President Alan García’s approval rating to 26 percent this month, the lowest level since he took office in 2006.

***

“Food prices keep on rising, and the government doesn’t pay attention to the eating halls,” said María Bozeta, director of one of three associations that represent eating halls in Lima.

All modern famines are failures of entitlement, not of food production. There’s enough food, but some people due to poverty or other barriers cannot get it. That’s the conclusion of Bengali genius and Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, and the subject of his 1981 book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation — but the conclusion will not be surprising to anyone who knows the history of the Irish potato famine, when due to English policies, Ireland was a net exporter of food, keeping food prices high, while its poor starved to death because their own potato crops failed and they could not afford to buy food.

If, as seems inevitable, energy prices continue to rise, the result will not just be an increased cost to drive or transport goods. The result will be that women with dependent children living in poverty around the world cannot afford to eat. This world, taken as a whole, is wealthy enough to apply a number of solutions to that. But history suggests that women are and remain so disempowered globally that nothing much will be done.

The interplay between energy, food and poverty is complex (for example, food charity can depress local farmers’ income, preventing some hard working folks from moving up out of poverty by their own hard work); and a book-length treatment is both beyond my expertise and beyond the scope of this medium. So I’ll leave it like this: when talking about energy policy, let’s not just talk about how and where folks in wealthy countries drive, or power our televisions. Let’s remember that the policy choices that affect these things also affect whether a mother of four young children living on $300 a year, or even less, can feed herself and her kids, and let’s insist that the policy issue be framed to include her.

*The simplicity of the title is powerful, and I picked it before I found ABW’s post, where she apparently came to the same conclusion.

Woman fights back against rapist, mob sexually assaults her. UConn. Trigger warning.

Every man involved in the assault must be identified, and their names so publicized that they cannot apply for a job or an apartment without their role in this sexual violence coming up. UConn must hold them accountable. If the school does not condemn this, it condones it.

On Memorial Day weekend, I will watch the Indianapolis 500. Motorsports can be divided into a lot of types and series; Indy is the senior and signature race of the Indy Racing League series. Indy is an oval, the cars are open-wheel. I love open-wheel racing, but I much prefer road courses. I follow Formula One much more closely. More about that later. So Indy is not my favorite series or kind of racing, but I will watch anyway — because of Indy’s place in history, and because of Danica Patrick’s.

There have been pioneering women at the high levels of many forms of racing, but especially at Indy, I think because of its symbolic importance. First, there was Guthrie. She started out as an aerospace engineer who went racing full-time. She raced around the Sports Car Club of America for a while and turned to Nascar, where she was the first woman to race in their top series, then the Winston Cup. She drove the Daytona 500 and was Rookie of the Year, and she competed in 33 Winston Cup events, finishing as high as sixth. Starting in 1977 she raced in open-wheels at Indy, too. She qualified in 1977, ‘78 and ‘79. The first time, the car had problems and she did poorly. The last time, same thing. But in between, in 1978, she had a really good run, finishing in the top ten: ninth, after starting 15th. With a good car, she could drive with the best in the sport. (Guthrie has a well-regarded autobiography, “A Life at Full Throttle.”)

I have a soft spot for Lyn St. James because, while I was too young to remember Guthrie, I watched St. James’ debut with rapt attention. She was already a road-racing veteran when I first saw her, and in her career she drove twice at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, won the 24 Hours of Daytona twice, and won the 12 Hours of Sebring once. I saw her qualify at the back of the pack in 1992 for Indy. The cars were powerful and twitchy and the track was slick that year; the polesitter crashed on the formation lap! Lyn St. James finished a heroic eleventh, keeping the car on the track when thirteen cars crashed and most of the field did not finish, and was Rookie of the Year — the only rookie to even finish a nerve-shattering 500 miles. Lyn made seven trips to the Brickyard (As Indy is called for the three-foot strip of bricks at the start-finish line), but never again had a really competetive car and never managed a top-ten finish. With a lifetime of top-flight racing, she has not retired to catch up on her reading. Instead, she now runs the nonprofit Winner’s Circle Foundation.

Sarah Fisher started at Indy at just nineteen years of age. When she and St. James started together, it was the first Indy with two women racing. The traditional “Gentlemen, Start your Engines!” has been “Lady and Gentlemen …,” at least since St. James (I don’t recall if they acknowledged Guthrie) but that year, for the first time and not the last, it was “Ladies and Gentlemen …” Sarah Fisher has her own team now, but she’s never had a very good ride. In a half-dozen trips, she has crashed several times and never finished better than 18th. However, elsewhere in the series she managed a pole position, the first woman to start an Indy race from the pole.

Everyone who followed racing and some who don’t saw Patrick coming. She moved to Europe at 16, alone, to race in the brutally competetive Formula Ford series there. She was second at the English Formula Ford festival, the best ever finish by an American. Motorsports journalists started reporting on her after that, seeing her move through the Formula Atlantics towards the big show.

Qualifying for the 2005 Indy, her car’s rear slid in the first turn. It was a disastrous moment; most drivers would have been in the wall, and she shocked everyone by keeping it on the track and then, icewater in her veins, staying fast despite the scare to start fourth, the best starting position by a woman. She led nineteen laps (first woman to lead at Indy), overcoming two key mistakes to finish fouth, the highest by a woman, and to be named Rookie of the Year. (Two out of five women to face the Indianapolis 500 have been Rookie of the Year. That’s 40%. Just sayin’.)

She took three poles her rookie season, but did not win a race. Everyone knew she could, everyone waited to see when she would.

In 2006 at Indy, with a less competetive car and still a bit shaken by the death of teammate Paul Dana, she started and finished Eighth — two top ten finishes in two tries.

In 2007, she was in the hunt and ran as high as second, but finished eight when Scotsman of Italian descent (and Ashley Judd’s husband) Dario Franchitti won the rain-shortened race. Three top ten finishes in three consecutive years. In the season as a whole, she had three podium finishes.

As Jill reported, in late April, 2008, she won the Japan 300 at Motegi. She is the first woman to win an Indy race. That should put her head in the right place as she heads into this year’s Indianapolis 500.

There have certainly been women racers of distinction in other series. In drag racing, both dragsters and pro stock bikes have women legends in their history (Shirley Muldowney and Angelle Sampey, respectively). (Bonnie Bedelia, one of the better actors of her generation I think, played Muldowney in a now-dated but very watchable movie, Heart Like a Wheel.)

Michele Mouton very nearly won the World Rally Championship in an Audi Quattro that lacked the reliability to match her skills, and did win both one of the series events and a prestigious non-series event, the Pike’s Peak hill-climb. When the governing body decided that the “killer B” Group B rally cars were too fast and powerful, Mouton retired rather than race in less powerful Group A cars. Ha!

However, there is a lot of room for improvement at the top. NASCAR has not had much in the way of women; Formula One has had only five women drive and only one had what anyone would call a career (Lella Lombardi finished as high as Sixth, the other four women had just a handful of races each and never earned a championship point).

There are some women coming up in sports car racing; Liz Halliday does well in American Le Mans, and I think Milka Duno (the third woman, with Patrick and Fisher, in the 2007 Indy) may be less out of her depth in sports cars than she is in Indy cars. Simone De Silvestro got a win in Atlantics in April, and with Katherine Legge is the only woman to win in Atlantics. Legge also tested an F1 car, though she races the German Touring Car series for Audi now. But the groundswell of women at the lower levels of racing is not yet fairly reflected at the upper levels. There should be women in F1 cars, WRC cars, sports cars at ALMS and at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and in NASCAR’s top series every year, not just a few times a decade. I hope we’re getting there.

When my daughter is old enough to watch it with me, I hope that as the starter says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines,” eight, ten, twelve women fire the engines and pull out on the formation lap, each hoping to have her name inscribed on the Borg-Warner Trophy, and little girls in karts around the country can root for any woman, not just the woman.

I don’t pretend to have exhautive knowledge of the women in the pipeline for the top series; if anybody knows of women we should keep an eye on, leave them in comments.

I already posted about reading one sex worker’s blog; that’s not the only one that got my attention recently.

I’ve been reading College Call Girl. She has been on a bit of a break for the last three weeks, and I don’t know her personally, so I have no idea when or if she’s coming back, but I keep hoping.

Now, some folks may think that this is light reading, or one-handed reading. And sometimes it is. But she alternates between the glib and hot, soul-searching, and flat-out patriarchy-blaming; so that passages like this:

Even with all the admittedly sinful diddling and fingering and rubbing and stroking I had done before, I had never once done something as terrible, as sacrilegious as what I found myself doing now.

I was masturbating to the Bible.

I don’t remember what section in particular it was that got me so steamed up, although I think it was in the Old Testament.

rub shoulders with passages like this:

One of the cruelest tragedies of the sex industry is that it attracts girls like me who already have skewed ideas about sex and self-worth and then completely reinforces all our secret fears. The men you meet, the whole lifestyle, whispers to you that you were right all along, that all that really matters is being desired.

I still struggle every day to change my thinking. It makes me almost sick to my stomach to meet new people whether in a personal or professional capacity, because I worry they will not think I am pretty. Most of my friends are men with whom I have had former dalliances because I just do not feel comfortable around people who I don’t know with certainty find me sexually attractive. In my head, my worth is completely tied up in my appearance and sex. As a result of being abused at a young age, my thinking is fucked. There is something wrong with my brain. No matter how logically I know that who I am is more important than how sexy I look, I have internalized the lesson that it is my sexuality that makes me lovable.

Of course, this is a trap that will keep me perpetually insecure because not everyone is always going to be attracted to me. When you feel that perfectly normal fact as a deep blow to your self-esteem, it’s impossible to ever really feel confident.

She’s not a representative sample; she’s one woman from a particular social position (white, class-privileged, etc.). She doesn’t represent all sex workers — nobody could, or should, or should be expected to. She represents her own experience; which is ambiguous and nuanced. She both loves and hates sex work; she’s honest about keeping it light to keep her audience entertained, and honest that she knows this glamorizes and whitewashes her own experiences:

But there’s another side to this deal that I’m afraid I haven’t shown you. It’s not easy to write about prostitution in a totally honest way because it is painful… I am a tangle of contradictions. I am not ashamed of my choices and I will fully defend mine or anyone else’s right to make them. But when you ask me if you should do this? My immediate instinct is a loud, desperate no.

Along her road of self-reflective posts, CCG put up one that I’ll probably never forget, [Trigger Warning] the sort of speaking out that one woman can do to make thousands of other women feel less alone:

The Number is Eight

I have been sexually assaulted more than once. Each time that it happened to me, I felt that extenuating circumstances kept it from truly being rape. I was working as a prostitute, he was my boyfriend, I was drunk, I got in the car. I never believed that I had fought hard enough. I made excuses for the men who hurt me; I told myself “he didn’t know what he was doing.” When I spoke about my experiences with sexual assault (which I did very rarely), I would say only that “a lot of bad things have happened to me.”

And she lists them. And she tells the story. And every one will resonate with some woman out there who reads it, who will know that it wasn’t just her; that it wasn’t her fault; that what happened to her was wrong.

Nothing I ever write will matter that much.

Posting on the Feminist SF Blog, the Angry Black Woman quotes people from both sides¹ of a debate going on about Podcastle, the new fantasy fiction podcast edited by our own Mandolin (in her secret identity as mild-manner fantasy/sf writer Rachel Swirsky).²

Essentially, some posters feel that Mandolin has infected Podcastle with (as ABW says) girl cooties, or maybe it’s feminist cooties. It’s hard to tell what the complaint is, because the goal posts shift.

Is it too many female-centric stories? No, wait, it’s not — because if that was objectionable, surely the critics would also be objecting to the fact that on Escape Pod, 14 of the last 16 stories had male narrators.

But we’re told it’s not too many stories about women, it’s too many female-empowerment stories in Podcastle. Except that “Come Lady Death” is hardly a female-empowerment story, unless “female empowerment story” is defined as any stories with strong female characters. Nor is four stories really enough of a sample size to say anything.

Well, it’s not just four stories — this complain is about the stories appearing on Podcastle, Pseudopod (the horror podcast), and Escape Pod, which in a single month did contain several different stories that really did have female empowerment or anti-sexist themes (oh nooooo)! But choosing just a single month, when it’s obvious that choosing any other time period would lead to different results (see “14 out of 16″ statistic, above), is just cherry-picking.

No, wait, it’s that too many stories are too political, and too heavy. But stories like Goosegirl and Come Lady Death aren’t political at all. So the only way this complaint makes sense is if including any stories with sociopolitical themes at all, is defined as too many.

At this point, the football field is scratched up like a tic-tac-toe board by all the shifting goalposts. I can’t help but wonder if ABW isn’t right — if this isn’t really about the girl cooties.

Earlier on, I left this comment on Podcastle:

It’s commonplace for podcasts to be organized by male editors, with stories by male writers, about male protagonists, and read by male readers. It’s not uncommon for there to be several such episodes in a row.

There’s nothing wrong with male writers, editors, readers, or protagonists, of course.

What is problematic is the double-standard. That the large majority of published stories are by men, published by men, and about men is something we’re used to; it’s invisible, like water for seahorses. But even one or two podcasts that involve multiple female creators will be objected to.

I think that’s an accurate take on the situation.³ There is, or should be, nothing extraordinary about several stories in a row that involve female creators, female protagonists, or female protagonists whose story involves working to overcome a disadvantage of some sort (i.e., a “female empowerment” story). Even in a situation of total equality, random chance would frequently sort small numbers of such stories together.

In a reasonable world, there’d be nothing extraordinary about an election in which a white woman and an African American man happen to be major candidates. In a reasonable world, there’d be nothing notable about a podcast happening to have a few stories in a row involving women, or involving women overcoming obstacles, or whatever the complaint is. That these things are notable doesn’t say anything about black candidates, woman candidates, or about how Mandolin is editing Podcaste. They do, however, say something unfortunate about the less-than-reasonable world we live in.

1. Including quoting a comment I wrote.
2. She wears glasses when she’s Rachel, and amazingly no one ever notices she’s also the famous superhero The Amazing Mandolin — not even Lois Lane, who is totally in love with Mandolin and never gives Rachel the time of day.
3. Although I’d want to hedge “the large majority” to make it clear I’m talking about a particular submarket, not all stories ever written!

Sudy says:

The question is not what makes the issue feminist, but has a feminist perspective been applied to the issue?

Thinking cap? Check. Reading this is highly recommended.

Note: comments off. Go there.

The “D.C. Madam” has committed suicide.

Opinions among feminist about sex work vary widely, but I think we probably all agree about one thing: no just system would make things worse for the women that do the sex work, than for the men who act as customers. Yet, this blog has covered before, in this case, the johns were spared public humiliation, but the sex workers were dragged up on the stand and asked painfully invasive questions. This is not the first suicide in the case; according to the story, one of the women who worked for the service previously killed herself. A culture that puts women in a position of doing sex work and then so shames them and persecutes them for it that they take their own lives is deeply sick.