Alliance Blog

Today I wanted to post something positive, so I decided to go with Fatima Hassan’s essay to the Stanford class of 2009, recently published in the New York Times. I find her words, on the topic of obstetric and traumatic fistula, which causes women to leak urine and/or feces due to sexual violence and lack of maternal health care, nonetheless incredibly inspiring, reminding those of us in a position to help others why we can never stop working to rid the world of sexual violence:

… these women’s struggles are written into my soul, fueling my desire to change the world… When we truly listen to the communities we wish to serve, we absorb their pain and invigorate our search for justice and solutions. We cannot trick ourselves into thinking “someone else will do it” because we are the ones privileged to have attended college. It is now our responsibility to rethink and implement sustainable change, whether local or global.

I’ve been noticing the oddest thing in recent years.  An astonishing percentage of the women on book covers are cut in half!  It’s usually most obvious at the “New In Paperback” table at Barnes & Noble — yesterday I counted 50 books, of which 20 covers (6 shown below) featured a woman cut into pieces, or cropped oddly, or blurred, or facing away from the reader.  Why are women on covers so rarely allowed to make eye contact?

It might be even worse at Amazon: in their “Women’s Fiction” section, I count six out of six half-woman covers — 100%.