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The protest came after Nwabisa Ngcukana, 25, was allegedly attacked by a group of taxi-drivers and street hawkers for wearing a miniskirt.

“What we want to highlight is that women have rights — they have the right to choose what to wear,” said Nonhlanhla Mokeona from the People Opposing Women Abuse (Powa) organisation. She urged men to take part in the protest, to show they supported women’s rights.

Source: BBC. Fantastic photo of mini-skirted protestors (amongst many) from Czerwoni’s Flickr stream (of course).

As with the defence of ‘homosexual panic’ in gay bashings, crimes of passion seem to have an automatic ‘get out of jail’ card. We were angered and dismayed to hear that Bertrand Cantat — who hit actress Marie Trintignant an estimated 19 times in one attack — has been freed from jail half way into his eight year sentence for her murder. Apparently a ‘model prisoner’, Cantat now intends to resume his career as a singer and no doubt benefit from the deeply dubious halo effect of being ‘the left wing popstar who smashed his girlfriend’s head in in a jealous rage’.

Born Jan. 21, 1962, in Boulogne-Billancourt, just outside Paris, Marie Trintignant started her film career at age 5 when she appeared in “Mon Amour, Mon Amour,” which was directed by her mother and starred her father. She went on to act in more than 50 films and nominated 5 times for a César. She was also the mother of four children.

La Meute (The Pack), a feminist organisation, said that Cantat’s release sent the wrong signal to men in France, where one woman is killed every three days by a partner.

Mediaweek (US) reports, “In a national survey of 1,000 DVR users divided equally by sex, 48 percent of married women say the decision to purchase a DVR was their own, while 55 percent of the wives claim they understood how to interface with their unit’s myriad features better than their husbands.

The study, which was commissioned by Lifetime, offered “dramatic and counterintuitive results,” said Tim Brooks, the network’s senior vp of research. Of key interest to advertisers is the discovery that women are more likely to stop fast forwarding through commercials if a brand or product captures their attention.

While 99 percent of women say they use their DVRs to zap through commercial spots, 76 percent reported that they stopped for ads that are entertaining or relevant to their own interests. Women are also more likely to pause for TV and movie promos.

The full story is in this week’s edition of Mediaweek.

Turkish artist Pinar Yolacan — aka ‘the tripe artist’ — presented the following portraits as part of her first solo exhibition in New York City (Rivington Arms, New York December 10 - January 21, 2005).

The exhibition consisted of 19 subjects who were recruited via a casting call on craiglist. All of the subjects were white and between the ages of 50 and 70. Yolacan took a polaroid of each women and sent them off with a loose date at which they would reconvene. In the interim the artist studied the subjects, the kinds of personality traits their looks conveyed, and devised a garment that each would wear for the second shoot.

Yolacan sees a kind of ‘otherness’ (her term) in these women of a certain age and class that she magnifies in their garments made out of tripe, cow stomach, chicken skin and lamb testicles. The outfits convey the Victorian elegance that Yolacan perceived in such women during her first experiences of Western European life in the UK.