Politics – Page 4

I reject the notion that our children have to die.

Yesterday, a 19-year-old former student entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and pulled the fire alarm, drawing students and faculty outside so they could become easy targets for his semi-automatic rifle. He killed 17 people and sent another 14 to area hospitals with injuries. Students took shelter in barricaded classrooms, texting messages of love to their families while listening to their classmates and teachers getting gunned down in the hallways. The gunman was taken alive; the families of 17 children and adults weren’t so lucky. This was a tragedy and an atrocity, but I reject any notion that it was a mystery or an unpreventable inevitability.

While We Were Out: Ivanka Trump “All Lives Matter”-ed Black History Month

Feministe was recently down with technical issues, so of course that’s when Ivanka Trump would unload the dual Twitter turd of underscoring her father’s flat-out incompetence and super-duper racism in issues relating to equality, dignity, opportunity, and/or race whilst negating the “Black” part of Black History Month. In celebration of Black History Month, of course.

Quick Hit: The biological realities of bad sex and really bad sex

A famous quote from Margaret Atwood lays out one of the big divides that stands between women’s and men’s life experiences: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” At The Week, Lili Loofbourow presents a bad-sex corollary: Men think sex is bad when she’s just lying there, and women think it’s bad when we come away bleeding.

More than 150 young women sent Larry Nassar to prison for life

[Trigger warning for child sexual abuse, in this post and at all links]

Larry Nassar, a former doctor for USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University, has been sentenced to up to 175 years in prison for sexually abusing seven girls under the age of 15, with more charges to be addressed in coming weeks. But before sentencing, the judge heard victim impact statements from every accuser who chose to speak out. Originally, 88 women were expected to speak over four days. At final count, 156 women — empowered by what gymnast Aly Raisman called an “army of survivors” — gave statements over seven days, condemning Nassar and the systems at Michigan State, USA Gymnastics, and the U.S. Olympic Committee that failed to protect them.

Y’all, Don’t Do This: Put a Pussyhat on Harriet Tubman

Someone put a Pussyhat on Harriet Tubman.

It was the memorial to Harriet Tubman in Harlem, the one with the roots of slavery trying to hold her back as she strides determinedly toward freedom, and someone knitted a Harriet-Tubman-statue-sized pink Pussyhat and then put it on her.

Y’all, don’t do that.

Other people talk about Babe, Grace, Aziz Ansari, and consent (Updated)

On Tuesday, I dismantled Caitlin Flanagan’s steaming hot pile of take on the moral failings of Grace — the woman who talked about her horrible date with Aziz Ansari — and feminism and modern women. Here are women who are also speaking on the matter and who aren’t just the worst person ever.

Aziz Ansari is an asshole, and Caitlin Flanagan is also an asshole

The world (or, at least, the part of it that I live in) has been talking about the recent expose by a woman, pseudonymously known as Grace, who went out on a date with comedian Aziz Ansari and ended up getting persistently and aggressively pursued, and aggressively kissed, fingered, and dry humped, plus a weird thing where he kept sticking his fingers down her throat, over her objections. In a statement Ansari released in response, he doesn’t dispute her account of the events of the night — he that he’d thought she was into it. There have been a lot of analyses and responses, many of which I’ll get to later on this blog. But then Caitlin Flanagan decided to jump in — because of course she did — being, as is her way, the fucking worst. So here’s some stuff about “The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari.”

Oprah won the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and her acceptance speech was everything

Last night, Oprah Winfrey became the first black woman to receive the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2018 Golden Globes. She started her shattering speech by recounting a moment from her own childhood, watching Sidney Poitier become the first black man to receive a Best Actor Oscar in 1964. And her speech only became more moving and heart-wrenching and inspiring from there.

Alabama Senate election open thread

On Tuesday night, something momentous happened: The people of Alabama elected a Democratic senator for the first time in over 25 years. By the tiniest of margins — 49.9 percent to 48.4 percent — voters picked Doug Jones over disgraced judge and accused child molester Roy Moore. So there’s a lot to discuss there.

Reproductive organs: This is the shit I’m talking about

[Trigger warning: transphobia]

This is the shit I’m talking about: TERFs love to insist that women are not defined by our reproductive organs, until they need an excuse to exclude trans women, at which point we’re defined exclusively by our reproductive organs. And they always have to throw in a little goddess-moon-divine-menstruation magic, too, and that’s another one: Conservative Christians using their religion to police women’s bodies is wrong, but using foofy sacred-divine-goddess mysticism is perfectly acceptable for TERFy purposes.