International Women's Day March

INTO THE STREETS FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY!
SATURDAY MARCH 9TH, 6PM
Broadway & Columbus, SAN FRANCISCO

From Delhi to Ohio and Everywhere Else...
From the Global Epidemic of Rape to the Escalating Attacks on Abortion Rights...
From the Burkha to the Thong...

IF YOU ARE NOT FIGHTING THE OPPRESSION & DEGRADATION OF WOMEN,
YOU ARE SAYING IT’S OKAY!

The oppression of women is so common and so woven into all aspects of life that you walk through
most days – maybe your whole life up until now – without even seeing what is right in front of your
eyes. Start seeing.

See Joyti Singh, the 23-year-old medical student who was kidnapped and gang-raped and tortured
for hours on a bus in Delhi, India by six men, only to die 13 days later. See the 16-year-old who was
gang-raped in Stuebenville, Ohio by the high school football stars, urinated on, photographed and
dragged to three different parties where no one stopped this. See the 1 in 3 women on this planet
who will be raped or beaten in her lifetime.

See Savita Hallapanavar, the 31-year-old who died because she was denied an abortion due to
Ireland's Catholic anti-abortion laws. See the estimated 70,000 women who die each year due to
the denial of safe, legal abortions and the many, many more who are forced to bear children against
their will.

See Feng Jianmei, the 23-year-old woman in China who was 7 months pregnant, but could not pay
the the 40,000 yuan fine for having a second child. She was attacked by government officials,
beaten, a bag thrown over her head, abducted, and given an injection, inducing a miscarriage. See
the throngs of woman in Asia forced into hysterectomies in the name of population control.
See the women ages 15 to 25 who make up 85% of the sweatshop labor in the world, spending
their best years locked in dangerous factories stitching your clothes or assembling your electronics
until their fingers and backs and eyesight give out and their seats are filled by the seemingly
endless stream of desperate young women to be similarly used up and cast off.

See the women and girls who will be mutilated in acid attacks for going to school, for not wearing the veil, or simply because their in-laws do not find them a useful enough slave.

See the millions of young girls whose genitals are cut to dull their sexual sensation and keep them “pure” for their future husbands/owners.

See the millions of women who are kidnapped, tricked, sold by starving families, beaten and pimped, and devastated in the global sex slave trade on a scale never seen before in history.

See how every woman is degraded and demeaned by this culture that has increasingly mainstreamed pornography even as pornography has become increasingly violent, degrading, humiliating and cruel. See how this fuels the growing culture of hatred and vengeance and massive violence against women.

And see the truth: there is not a single place on the planet where it is safe to be female. There is no place-on the street or in one's home, from Delhi to Congo to Ohio and everywhere else-where women and girls are not in danger of being raped. Where women and girls are not then blamed and shamed and devalued for being raped. Where women and girls are not told to "get over it" when they are raped.

Where women are not reduced to breeders of children – shamed, coerced or forced into bearing children against their will. Where abortion and even birth control is not either illegal, seriously under attack, or mandatory. Both denying women abortions and forcing them into operations they do not need or want, is like rape. It is the forcible control over women by a male-supremacist society.

In a world like this, there is no “neutral.”

If you are not fighting the oppression and degradation of women, you are saying it’s okay!

This International Women's Day, 2013, join us in the streets to say:
Women are not objects. Women are not things to be used for the sexual pleasure of men NOR are they breeders of children. WOMEN ARE HUMAN BEINGS CAPABLE OF FULL EQUALITY IN EVERY REALM!

We refuse to accept a world which enslaves and degrades half of humanity simply because they are born female. We are done turning our heads and making excuses. We are done swallowing the daily insults and abuses. We are done blaming ourselves and/or each other.

We are done choking on our rage. We dare to confront this war on women head-on, without fear and without compromise.

We draw inspiration – and a profound lesson – from the courageous women and men who defied arrest, water-cannons, brutality and slander to rise up in the tens of thousands in India against the gang-rape of Joyti Singh: it is only by unleashing the pent up fury of women at their long centuries of oppression and drawing forward the shared outrage of many men that violence against women begins to be taken seriously. It is only by stepping out together in mass political resistance that we begin to realize our own potential strength, to change ourselves, and to change what millions more broadly think is tolerable – and possible.

Only through mass, ferocious, political struggle – beginning in our hundreds and fighting to bring forward thousands and soon millions – that we can create a world where women can walk the earth free of fear of rape or violence from men, a world where women participate fully and equally in every realm together with men, a world where being born female has no more consequence on one's life opportunities than being born with the ability to wiggle one's ears.

For International Women's Day 2013, through our mass public protests around the country – joining with women and men around the world – we will make it known: there is a new movement taking hold, a movement you have to join, a movement that will not stop until all the chains that bind women have been shattered forever.

Don't be someone who sits back and lets horrors continue – join the struggle to CHANGE THE COURSE OF HISTORY!