(via ladypieces)
Top 10 states searching for “gay sex” on Google.
The bible belt..
Aaaaaaand Nevada
Who’s surprised?
(via mizztwerk)
(On why he let Willow cut all of her hair off)
Read more: Will Smith On Allowing Willow To Cut Her Hair: ‘She Has Got To Have Command Of Her Body’ | Necole Bitchie.com
- He raises a really great point. What would it mean to believe very early that my body was mine. That it’s not for anyone or for any particular purpose other than to be mine until I decide otherwise.
(via larepublicadedet)
I was damned near 30 before I could believe my body belonged to me & me alone. Dear people who take an issue with this,
Let the Smiths do right by their babies & shut the fuck up about how you think they should parent.
(via karnythia)
(via insanepoet9)
EMMONAK, Alaska — She was 19, a young Alaska Native woman in this icebound fishing village of 800 in the Yukon River delta, when an intruder broke into her home and raped her. The man left. Shaking, the woman called the tribal police, a force of three. It was late at night. No one answered. She left a message on the department’s voice mail system. Her call was never returned. She was left to recover on her own.
Multimedia
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
A sign at Emmonak’s shelter. One in three American Indian women have been raped or have experienced an attempted rape, according to the Justice Department. Their rate of sexual assault is more than twice the national average. More Photos »
Steve Remich for The New York Times
Lisa Marie Iyotte said her rape had never been prosecuted. More Photos »
The Emmonak Women’s Shelter needs money to stay open. More Photos »
“I drank a lot,” she said this spring, three years later. “You get to a certain point, it hits a wall.”
One in three American Indian women have been raped or have experienced an attempted rape, according to the Justice Department. Their rate of sexual assault is more than twice the national average. And no place, women’s advocates say, is more dangerous than Alaska’s isolated villages, where there are no roads in or out, and where people are further cut off by undependable telephone, electrical and Internet service.
The issue of sexual assaults on American Indian women has become one of the major sources of discord in the current debate between the White House and the House of Representatives over the latest reauthorization of the landmark Violence Against Women Act of 1994.
A Senate version, passed with broad bipartisan support, would grant new powers to tribal courts to prosecute non-Indians suspected of sexually assaulting their Indian spouses or domestic partners. But House Republicans, and some Senate Republicans, oppose the provision as a dangerous expansion of the tribal courts’ authority, and it was excluded from the version that the House passed last Wednesday. The House and Senate are seeking to negotiate a compromise.
Here in Emmonak, the overmatched police have failed to keep statistics related to rape. A national study mandated by Congress in 2004 to examine the extent of sexual violence on tribal lands remains unfinished because, the Justice Department says, the $2 million allocation is insufficient.
But according a survey by the Alaska Federation of Natives, the rate of sexual violence in rural villages like Emmonak is as much as 12 times the national rate. And interviews with Native American women here and across the nation’s tribal reservations suggest an even grimmer reality: They say few, if any, female relatives or close friends have escaped sexual violence.
“We should never have a woman come into the office saying, ‘I need to learn more about Plan B for when my daughter gets raped,’ ” said Charon Asetoyer, a women’s health advocate on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, referring to the morning-after pill. “That’s what’s so frightening — that it’s more expected than unexpected. It has become a norm for young women.”
The difficulties facing American Indian women who have been raped are myriad, and include a shortage of sexual assault kits at Indian Health Service hospitals, where there is also a lack of access to birth control and sexually transmitted disease testing. There are also too few nurses trained to perform rape examinations, which are generally necessary to bring cases to trial.
Women say the tribal police often discourage them from reporting sexual assaults, and Indian Health Service hospitals complain they lack cameras to document injuries.
Police and prosecutors, overwhelmed by the crime that buffets most reservations, acknowledge that they are often able to offer only tepid responses to what tribal leaders say has become a crisis.
Reasons for the high rate of sexual assaults among American Indians are poorly understood, but explanations include a breakdown in the family structure, a lack of discussion about sexual violence and alcohol abuse.
Rape, according to Indian women, has been distressingly common for generations, and they say tribal officials and the federal and state authorities have done little to help halt it, leading to its being significantly underreported.
In the Navajo Nation, which encompasses parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, 329 rape cases were reported in 2007 among a population of about 180,000. Five years later, there have been only 17 arrests. Women’s advocates on the reservation say only about 10 percent of sexual assaults are reported.
The young woman who was raped in Emmonak, now 22, asked that her name not be used because she fears retaliation from her attacker, whom she still sees in the village. She said she knew of five other women he had raped, though she is the only one who reported the crime.
Nationwide, an arrest is made in just 13 percent of the sexual assaults reported by American Indian women, according to the Justice Department, compared with 35 percent for black women and 32 percent for whites.
In South Dakota, Indians make up 10 percent of the population, but account for 40 percent of the victims of sexual assault. Alaska Natives are 15 percent of that state’s population, but constitute 61 percent of its victims of sexual assault.
The Justice Department did not prosecute 65 percent of the rape cases on Indian reservations in 2011. And though the department said it had mandated extra training for prosecutors and directed each field office to develop its own plan to help reduce violence against women, some advocates for Native American women said they no longer pressed victims to report rapes.
“I feel bad saying that,” said Sarah Deer, a law professor at William Mitchell College of Law in Minnesota and an authority on violent crime on reservations. “But it compounds the trauma if you are willing to stand up and testify and they can’t help you.”
Despite the low rates of arrests and prosecutions, convicted sexual offenders are abundant on tribal lands. The Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, with about 25,000 people, is home to 99 Class 3 sex offenders, those deemed most likely to commit sex crimes after their release from prison. The Tohono O’odham tribe’s reservation in Arizona, where about 15,000 people live, has 184, according to the Justice Department.
By comparison, Boston, with a population of 618,000, has 252 Class 3 offenders. Minneapolis, with a population of 383,000, has 101, according to the local police.
The agencies responsible for aiding the victims of sexual assault among American Indians are often ill prepared.
The Indian Health Service, for instance, provides exams for rape victims at only 27 of the 45 hospitals it finances and, according to a federal report in 2011, did not keep adequate track of the number of sexual assault victims its facilities treat and lacked an overall policy for treating rape victims. Additionally, the health service has just 73 trained sexual assault examiners.
The Justice Department, which has increased the number of F.B.I. agents and United States attorneys on Indian reservations and is seeking to help the Indian Health Service train more nurses, said combating sexual violence was a priority.
“There’s no quick fix. There’s no one thing that will fix the system,” said Virginia Davis, deputy director for policy development in the department’s Office on Violence Against Women. “We’re taking a systematic approach to this — thinking about different ways to solve the problem.”
In the meantime, the problem persists. Lisa Marie Iyotte, 43, who was raped on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, said prosecutors had never told her why they did not charge the man arrested in that crime. He was later convicted of another rape, and when he was released from prison in 2008 and moved back to the reservation, no one told her, she said. She has not seen him yet.
“When I think about it, I say, ‘What am I going to do?’ ” she said. “I don’t know.”
Nine hundred miles away, in the Navajo Nation, Caroline Antone, 50, an advocate for the reservation’s victims of sexual violence who has herself been raped, said sexual assault was virtually routine in her community.
“I know only a couple of people who have not been raped,” she said. “Out of hundreds.”
Sweet, smooth vocals always get my attention and I’m a sucker for a well played vocal scat – thus my ears perked up when I first heard Julia Keefe of the Nez Perce Tribe. Her voice is of another era and stands out in this one as one of the only jazz songbirds in Indian Country. But she’s not the first.
Born in 1989 in Seattle, Keefe is currently a senior studying jazz performance at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, though it’s been since grade seven that Keefe has been singing jazz. She has performed on the East and West coasts and if you’ve seen her live, you’ve noticed that she typically dedicates a song to the legendary Mildred Bailey at every performance.
Bailey was a groundbreaking and influential blues and jazz performer in the 30s and 40s, and a Coeur d’Alene tribal member. Early in her studies Keefe was drawn to Mildred’s life and work and in 2009 performed her musical tribute Thoroughly Modern: Mildred Bailey Songs at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in 2009. But her passion for Bailey didn’t stop there.
In Indian Country Today’s Jazz Vocalist Julia Keefe ‘Just Likes to Sing’ Keefe describes to Jack McNeel her experience visiting the Jazz Hall of Fame for the first time at New York’s Lincoln Center:
“It was beautiful and I loved it,” she said, “But I noticed there were only four women in the Jazz Hall of Fame and Mildred Bailey wasn’t one of them.” Those four are Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Bessie Smith and Mary Lou Williams.
She doesn’t question that those four belonged — but says she “sort of realized there was a great injustice being done. I feel without Mildred Bailey and what she did, we wouldn’t have Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holliday. She was the one who kicked open the door and made way for those amazing vocalists to get the stature they got.”
This past winter, Julia was home in Spokane on break and was asked to do a gig at the Coeur d’Alene Casino. “It was a private event for the Idaho State Legislature and some of the tribal council,” she explained. “I brought some of my Mildred Bailey stuff and said a few words about her, the things she had done for women in jazz and Native Americans in jazz.”
“The Idaho Legislature was just completely engrossed,” Keefe says. “They were talking like they loved it. They came up afterwards and said they’d like to help any way they could. I told them I was hoping to get Mildred Bailey into the Jazz Hall of Fame.” This March, both the Idaho House and Idaho Senate passed resolutions to honor Mildred and to support and encourage induction into the Hall of Fame.
Julia Keefe put her idea into action. Her open letter to the Jazz Hall of Fame selection committee can be read at whereismildred.com and while you’re there, be sure to sign the petition!
Mildred Bailey died at the young age of 44 – her story and her songs are truly worth digging into, if you haven’t already. As for Julia Keefe, she reports on ICTMN:
“My plan for the future is just to perform as much as possible. I love it. I love singing. I love entertaining people so that’s where my life blood is, where my joy comes from. My plan is just to go out there and do it whatever way I can.”
We look forward to it.
(via ayiman)
To my fellow Whovians… Did anyone else just see Rihanna come out of the Pandorica on American Idol? Seriously, is that the Pandorica from season 5?
What? No. That would be ridiculo-
(via sea-dyke)
I cannot say I have.
An Instagram
Personal1-How are you?
2-Post a picture of yourself.
3-Do you ever wish you were someone else?
4-What is your entire name?
5-How old are you?
6-Age you get mistaken for:
7-Your zodiac/horoscope and if you think it fits your personality:
8-What did you do on your last birthday?
9-What is one thing you would like to accomplish before your next birthday?
10-What is your hair color?
11-Have you ever dyed your hair?
12-What is your eye color?
13-If you could change your eye color, would you?
14-Do you wear contacts/glasses?
18-Do you have any tattoos?
19-Do you have any piercings?
20-Left or right handed?
21-What’s your sexual orientation?
22-Do you drink?
23-Do you smoke?
24-Do you have any pets?
25-Where do you work?
26-Something you are working on right now:
27-Do you have any “rules” about food?
28-Where are you from?
29-What would you say is your best quality?
30-What do you think you’re really good at?
31-What do you think you’re really bad at?
33-Are you a bad person?
34-Are you nice to everyone?
36-Has someone ever spread a nasty rumor about you?
37-What is your ideal bed? Why?
38-Did you wake up cranky?
39-Do you sleep with a stuffed toy?
40-What do you think about the most?
42-What you want to be when you “get older”?
43-What are your career goals?
44-What is your ideal career?
45-Is your life anything like it was two years ago?
46-Do you replay things that have happened in your head?
47-Have you ever had an imaginary friend?
48-Say 10 facts about your room:
49-Do you have any phobias?
50-Have you ever been to a psychiatrist/therapist?
51-Are you allergic to anything? If so, what?
52-Ever broken any bones?
53-Ever come close to death?
60-Do you have a facebook? If so, would you add the person who sent you this?
61-Do you have any pictures on your Facebook?
62-Describe yourself in one word/sentence:
63-A quote you try to live by:
64-A famous person you’ve been compared to:
65-Weird things you do when you’re alone:
66-Something you do without realising:
68-Someone you’d like to be for a day and why:
69-Leave me a compliment:Favorites
70-What is your favorite thing to do?
71-What’s your favorite color?
73-What’s your favorite movie?
74-What are your favorite books?
75-What is your favorite quote and why?
76-What is your favorite word?
77-What is your least favorite word?
78-What is your favorite type of food?
79-You favorite ice cream?
80-What’s your favorite animal?
81-Dogs or cats?
82-Describe your favourite texture:
83-What is your favorite flower?
84-What’s your favourite scent? And on the opposite sex?
85-What is your favorite season?
86-What are the top five places you wish you could go before you die?
87-What are four things you can’t live without and why?
88-Which mythological creature are you most like? Why?
89-What’s your favorite television show?
90-Favorite place to shop at?
91-Say 2 facts about your favorite things:Friends
106-Would you ever smile at a stranger?
107-Do you prefer to be friends with girls or boys?
108-Who is someone you never tire of?
109-Do you have someone you can be your complete self around?
110-Who is your most loyal friend?
111-Is there anyone you can tell EVERYTHING to?
112-If your best friend died, what would you do?
113-Something you’ve lied about.
114-Have you ever felt replaced?
115-Say 5 facts about your bestfriend(s):Relationships
116-The last person you hugged?
117-Story of your first kiss?
118-Do you like kissing in public?
119-Have you ever kissed someone older than you?
120-You have a preference for boys or girls?
121-Is the male or female body closest to perfection?
127-What is the first thing you noticed in someone?
128-Are looks important in a relationship?
129-What’s the most superficial characteristic you look for?
130-What’s your opinion on age differences in relationships?
131-Would you ever date someone off of the Internet?
133-Do you have a crush on anyone?
134-A description of the girl/boy you like:
135-Say 1 fact about the person you like:
136-If the person you like says they like someone else, what would you say?
137-When was the last time you told someone you loved them?
138-Do you think someone has feelings for you?
139-Do you think someone is thinking about you right now?
140-Have you ever cried over a guy/girl?
141-Have you ever wanted someone you couldn’t have?
142-Anyone you’re giving up on?
143-Have you ever liked someone you didn’t expect to?
144-Have you ever liked someone who your friends hated?
145-Have you ever liked one of your best friends?
146-Has anyone told you they don’t want to ever lose you?
147-Is there a boy/girl who you would do absolutely everything for?
148-Is there someone you will never forget?
153-What’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for you?
154-What’s something sweet you’d like someone to do for you?
157-Are you in love?
158-Are you in a relationship?
159-If you have a boyfriend/girlfriend, what is your favorite thing about him/her?
160-Are relationships ever worth it?
161-Is there someone mad because you’re dating/talking to the person you are?
162-Can you commit to one person?
163-Do you think you can last in a relationship for 6 months and not cheat?
164-Do you ever want to get married?
165-Do you think you’ll be married in 5 years?
167-Do you get jealous easily?
168-The last time you felt jealous, and why?
169-What is your definition of cheating?
170-Have you ever been cheated on?
171-Do you forgive betrayal?
172-Have you ever cheated on someone?
173-Why did your last relationship fail?
174-Things you want to say to an ex:
175-A description of the person you dislike the most:
176-If your first true love knocked on your door with apology and presents, would you accept?
177-How many boyfriends/girlfriends have you had?
178-How long was your longest relationship?
179-You’ll love me if…
180-Share a relationship story:Music, movies and books
181-How often do you listen to music?
182-What kind of music you like?
183-Do you like to dance?
185-Have you heard a song that reminds you of someone today?
186-Share a song that takes you to a certain memory in the past:
187-A song that’s been stuck in your head:
188-Put your music player on shuffle and write the first ten songs that play:
189-A book you want to read/have recently read:
190-Describe your dream library:
191-Last movie you just watched:
192-Do you like watching what type of movies?Situations and crazy things
193-You’re in a tattoo parlor about to get inked. What are you getting done?
194-What’s something you can see yourself going to jail for?
195-If you could be any character, from any literary work, who would you choose to be?
196-You’re given $10,000…under one condition: you cannot keep the money for yourself. Who would you give it to?
197-If you had to go back in time and change one thing, what would it be?
198-If you were an element on the Periodic Table, which would you be and why?
199-If you had to delete one year of your life completely, which would it be?
200-You’re an Action Movie Hero. What’s your weapon of choice and the line you scream when defeating your arch enemy?
201-If you could design an amusement park ride, what would it be like?
202-What is the first curse word that comes to mind?
203-What the last party you went to was… and when the next will be…
204-Halloween costume idea?
205-How you’d spend ten thousand bucks?
206-Press ctrl+v and post:
207-Would you rather be stranded on a desert island with someone you love for ten years or someone you hate for a month? Explain why.
208-5 things within touching distance:
209-A drunken story:
210-What are you supposed to be doing right now?
211-Currently wanting to see anyone?
212-Why you follow me?
213-If you met me what would you do?
214-Leave me a ridiculous question:
215-Leave me a cute message:however many you put in my ask, i’ll double it in yours:)
(Source: imnotabondgirl, via insertwittyremark89)
