By Soraya Chemaly

By Soraya Chemaly

"As a senior in college in 2001, I was coming out of a morning class when I passed a television and saw two planes crash into the Twin Towers. That was the day I decided to join the military," writes Captain Rebecca Murga in an editorial for the New York Times. Murga discusses how other women prepared her for her experience -- "no matter what the job, or where the deployment, I would hear the same words from every woman I spoke to: It’s lonely. Scary. Intimidating. Exhilarating. Satisfying. Frustrating. Anything but easy." -- and details her own experiences as a "G.I. Jane."

Residents of New York state: did you know that it is completely legal for women to be topless anywhere a man can be topless? Well, it is. (It is not, however, legal to be completely nude; that goes for both sexes.) Not many people are familiar with New York's toplessness laws, so problems crop up all the time: breastfeeding mothers gets harassed, cops detain topless women before realizing they aren't breaking any laws. The latter happened recently to Moira Johnston, who has made it her personal mission to raise awareness for topless women's rights in NYC. She does so by -- what else? -- walking around the city topless. Watch a (NSFW) video interview with Johnston, via Gothamist, after the jump.

A new report from Human Rights Watch finds that the hundreds of thousands of female immigrant farmworkers in the U.S. face a high risk of sexual violence a lack of government protection. According to HRW, The 95-page report "describes rape, stalking, unwanted touching, exhibitionism, or vulgar and obscene language by supervisors, employers, and others in positions of power. Most farmworkers interviewed said they had experienced such treatment or knew others who had." The report notes that the reauthorization of the watered down Violence Against Women Act will help the situation, but will not go far enough.

By Camille Rivera

There’s a big secret about the bill to address the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, introduced by Representative Sandy Adams (R-FL), that’s no longer so secret: it’s racist, elitist, homophobic and anti-victim. The bill, which purports to support “true victims” of domestic and sexual violence while excluding lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) survivors, forcing immigrants to tell their abusive partners where they are and gutting protections for Native women. So, using my secret decoder ring, I have to assume that “true victims” equals heterosexual, non-transgender, non-immigrant, non Tribal, non-people of color victims. Or, to remove the negatives, “true victims” equals straight, white women.

It was one thing when George W. Bush put Heritage Community Services front-and-center in his efforts to tell the youth of America to stay pure until their wedding night. He shared the organization’s ideologies and was expected to throw political bone to those conservatives, like Anne Badgely, who helped get him elected. But to see Heritage Keepers— a blatantly sexist marriage promotion program for eighth graders — given a place of honor under our current administration is unconscionable.

From intrusive pat-downs to body scans to perceived profiling, the Transportation Security Administration always seems to be the target of complaints. Here's another one: It took the TSA almost four years to tell me what people complained about — in 2008. For instance, an elderly woman in a wheelchair was asked to walk through security and fell at Orlando International Airport. In another complaint, a man flying to Cancun demanded an investigation after finding that the bottle of Jack Daniels he packed in his luggage was empty by the time he arrived.

You're considered a slut by many if you have a sex life. Well guess what, America is full of sluts, as you can see from the map. A new crowd-sourced project called "Sluts Across America" wants to give voice to women who won't put up with these attacks on their freedom. You can add your own truck flap sexy silhouette to this interactive map and tell the world why you are a slut in 200 words. As the chief sluts behind this birth control advocacy project say, "If protecting ourselves makes us sluts, then it's time to redefine what "slut" actually means"

Glenn Greenwald's explosive Salon article on Sunday details how the U.S. government repeatedly detained, searched, and harassed Laura Poitras, an Oscar-and Emmy-nominated filmmaker – with no probable cause or even suspicion that Poitras had committed a crime. Not only is the detention, search, and interrogation of an innocent American – who the government does not even suspect committed a crime – completely enraging to any civil libertarian, but I am particularly disconcerted as Poitras has filmed three of my National Security Agency (NSA) clients and no doubt countless other courageous whistleblowers.

"Once primarily male veteran problems, homelessness and economic struggles are escalating among female veterans, whose numbers have grown during the past decade of U.S. wars while resources for them haven’t kept up," the Boston Globe reports. "The population of female veterans without permanent shelter has more than doubled in the last half-dozen years and may continue climbing now that the Iraq war has ended, sending women home with the same stresses as their male counterparts — plus some gender-specific ones that make them more susceptible to homelessness."

After a Pennsylvania middle school banned two students from wearing bracelets from the Keep A Breast Foundation featuring the slogan "i ♥ boobies," and a civil rights lawsuit ensued, the Women's Law Project filed an amicus brief, arguing that "the school’s ban silences young women during a pivotal time in their physical, cognitive, and emotional development and hinders their ability to reclaim their 'boobies' for themselves and speak freely about their bodies and their health." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit just heard arguments in the case this week.

A senior pathologist in the Los Angeles County coroner's office has sharply questioned the forensic evidence used to convict a 51-year-old woman of shaking her 7-week-old grandson to death, identifying a host of flaws in the case. The new report by the pathologist, Dr. James Ribe, details eight "diagnostic problems" with the coroner's 1996 ruling that the child had died from violent shaking or a forceful blow to the head. Ribe wrote that he saw little evidence that the infant had been attacked, noting "the complete absence of bodily trauma, such as face trauma, grab marks, bruises, rib fractures, or neck trauma."

Daniela Peláez is a Colombian student based in Miami who made headlines recently as yet another case of students who have an extremely bright future but no legal status in the United States. Currently 18 years old and the first in her class at North Miami High School, Peláez arrived in the United States at the age of four, a time in which her parents came to this country on tourist visas, for which Daniela would later received a deportation order.