Although I am not a lawyer, I have been spending quite some time reading about sexual crimes in my new home state of Maryland, prompted by a recent news story (first brought to my attention at Feministing and analyzed further at The Happy Feminist) about a state appeals court decision in which it was concluded that sexual consent cannot be withdrawn by a woman after vaginal penetration has occurred. The news article is both technically correct and rather misleading — the decision was somewhat complex, and a rape conviction was not "thrown out" specifically due to that conclusion, but the conclusion was made, and after some investigation, it's not the only problem that Maryland law has with sex crimes and consent.

Pharyngula, the blog of an evolutionist, has an interesting entry titled The Cost of Being a Woman in Science. It notes a letter in Nature pointing out that only 3 of the 25 European Young Investigator grants were awarded to women, despite 25% of the applicants having been female. The European Science Foundation is refusing to release the records necessary to determine exactly what happened.

Via an entry on Trish Wilson's blog, I was linked to an eloquent entry by Kameron Hurley over at Brutal Women about what kinds of things can go through a woman's head when she comes to believe that, despite using birth control, she might be pregnant.

Beyond that, it's a reminder of the costs, physical, emotional, and monetary, women must pay when faced with an unwanted pregnancy, and a tribute to the need to be in charge of your own life and your own body.

Back on the first of March, Jessica at Feministing wrote an entry on a grossly sexist contest being run by the Clear Channel radio station KDGE-FM in Texas. The name of the contest is "Pimp My Ride", in obvious reference to the MTV television show of the same name, which deals with remakes of ordinary looking vehicles into "cool-looking" status symbols in street culture. I'm not a fan of that kind of automotive transformation (even allowing for differences in taste, every example I've ever seen sacrifices efficiency, safety, performance, or all three for the sake of appearance), but the radio contest was much worse: instead of being about modifying cars with automotive tools into being better status symbols for a predominately male audience, it was about modifying women with surgical tools into being better status symbols for a predominately male audience.

There's an entry over at Feministing about whether the shift in the Democratic position on abortion is a good thing, by bringing more people into the party, or a bad thing, by turning the party into "Republican-lite", leaving the US without a liberal party. The answer to that is somewhat complicated by the nature of the American two-party system, but that's not really why I'm writing. In the comments of the Feministing entry, I saw:

There is an article over at Reason Online pointing out some of the absurdities (both theological and biological) involved in the assumption that human life begins at conception. It's a highly entertaining read. To a certain extent, it even applies to the "life begins at uterine implantation" reasoning, which I also find to be somewhat absurd. A small cluster of cells does not a human being make.

Credits to Alas, a Blog for the link.

There was an anti-abortion display set up at the parade grounds of Louisiana State University last weekend to commemorate Roe vs Wade. Predictably, this made a lot of people unhappy, and some of them were stupid about it. Over the weekend, 3,000 out of the 4,000 painted crosses that had been planted there were stolen or destroyed. Predictably, this made the people who set up this display (the "Students for Life" group and the St. Mary and St. Joseph Family Memorial Foundation) very upset, and now they're trying to call this a "hate crime" (which some bloggers are repeating and emphasizing) and threatening to sue the police for not "taking it seriously enough", presumably because they failed to immediately arrest and throw the book at five people a police officer saw removing crosses. (The officer in question did note who they were and directed them to leave immediately, and a full investigation is still ongoing.)

At law.com:

It takes a special... something... to sexually assault a legal professional at a sexual assault conference.

As a mostly unrelated legal side note, Groklaw has linked to a fascinating guide on how to use Rule 30(b)(6) to force corporations to give you a single point of contact for depositions who will answer for the company, preventing the corporation from setting up guessing games and shuffling executives around to hide things. I like the title: "Depositions and Wrongful Profits in Infringement Cases: Cornering Your Prey with Rule 30(b)(6)".